The World and all that it holds

Aleksander Hemon

Picador, £18.99

REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING

 

It is Sarajevo, June 1914, and one of the most devastating events of the 20th century is about to unfold. In his apothecary’s shop, Rafael Pinto, a Jewish doctor, is optimistic about what lies ahead: “Because we now lived in a brand-new century, progress was everywhere to behold, the future was endless…”

In his excitement, he has forgotten to put out a banner to celebrate the visit of Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Ősterreich-Este, Heir Apparent to the Habsburg Empire and Inspector General of the Imperial Armed Forces. When quizzed by an officer he is apologetic, but his thoughts are more on the good-looking soldier who – in a moment of near insanity – he kisses.

The kiss, amazingly, is returned. Not long after, a cannon is fired to herald the Archduke’s arrival, followed by another shot. The Archduke has been assassinated, and soon the First World War will begin. Within a few weeks, Pinto has joined the Imperial Army, with tens of thousands other Bosnians. As he reflects, “everything that happens is always the only thing that could happen; everything before this moment leads to this moment”.

You could not wish for a more thoughtful or philosophically questioning narrator than this most unusual and courageous young man. Indeed, The World and All That It Holds is as much a discussion of what it is to be human in desperate times as a saga of one individual as he is ricocheted in all directions, from 1914 until a few years after the end of the Second World War.

Aleksander Hemon, like his central character, is from Sarajevo, although he was stranded in America during the Bosnian war, and now teaches at Princeton. A writer for the New Yorker, with novels, short stories, essays and non-fiction to his name – he also writes screenplays – he brings to The World and All That It Holds the confidence of a writer able to work with big ideas and a huge body of material. In an epilogue, he sets out his premise when embarking on a historical epic such as this: “All I could ever do about the past, or any experience that was not immediately mine, was to imagine it and then dare tell stories about it, but only if I accept the inevitable failure of the project, because history is a matter of experience, of being, and not a structure, not a story.”

With those caveats in mind, Hemon has produced an unforgettable evocation of a devastating period of history, in which Pinto represents the plight of the refugee in any century, any place. Although the sweep of the novel covers the First World War, the Russian Revolution and, latterly, the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, there’s no need to worry about being spoon-fed dates and facts.

This is not history in the style of Robert Harris or CJ Sansom; it has more of a mythic quality, even while firmly rooted in real events that tore people from their moorings and cast them adrift.

In the army, Pinto meets Osman, a fellow Bosnian, and a Muslim. Religious difference is irrelevant as each recognises his soul mate.

Theirs is to become a love story to match Dr Zhivago, as they keep each other alive through the hell of trench warfare, during which they are captured as POWs, and sent to Tashkent: “No soldat, least of all Pinto, could ever have imagined they would be rotting in a frigid Russian jail in Turkestan. None of them had even heard of Tashkent.”

Charismatic and daring, Osman agrees to work for the Russians rooting out traitors to the cause, and biding his time until he can find a way to get both of them back to Sarajevo. Pinto’s voice, sometimes first-person, often third, binds this epic narrative tightly.

From the start, the reader steps into his mind, as he refers constantly to God and breaks into languages incomprehensible if you do not speak Spanjol – a Sarajevan dialect – or Bosnian, Turkish, even German and French. At first this is disconcerting, but within a few pages it is what makes Pinto distinctive, like a signature phrase in music. It is also a reminder of the way we read as children, effortlessly gliding over material we could not understand, yet tugged along by the story.

God is as integral to this tale as Pinto and Osman, as Pinto wrestles with the misery inflicted on people through no fault of their own. “God was invented by lonely people, by those who could not bear to think that no-one would ever care about them, spend a thought on their loneliness. We are not chosen, what we are is terribly lonely and unloved.”

When Osman goes on a mission and does not return, Pinto finds himself looking after a newborn baby whose mother died giving birth. He believes she is Osman’s and that in keeping Rahela alive, he is looking after Osman also. In what follows, Hemon suggests that those we have lost are always with us. They might be physically absent, yet they are wholly present.

Carrying Pinto from the savagery of the Russian Revolution across the desert to the abject poverty of the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai, Hemon traces the tides that have swept humanity since the days of the Old Testament. Living by his wits, battling but not always overcoming his opium addiction, and protecting Rahela as if she were his own, Pinto is the definition of a survivor. But what a toll it takes. At one point, he thinks: “He was only 43 and had already lived far too long and seen much too much. Not everyone gets the same amount of living in life.”

What keeps him going is not faith in a God, whom he rejects (despite talking to him constantly), but in the man he loves. This novel only slowly exerts its grip, but once its spell has been cast it is mesmerising. Much about it is tragic, brutal, cruel beyond comprehension; and yet it is lit by defiance, determination and, if not precisely with hope, then with the unquenchable desire to hold onto hope, which, perhaps, is the same thing.