Aleksandar Hemon

The linked stories of "Love and Obstacles" center around a young man from Yugosalvia who immigrates to America. In dazzling prose, Hemon (himself an immigrant from Yugoslavia) portrays the complications, "the obstacles," of growing up in a Communist butcosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in young adulthood.

Stories

Love and Obstacles

Kirsten Simkiss

If I could give half stars, I would probably give it 2.5 stars.

While the book is made up of separate stories, they all are stories about the same nameless character - a Sarajevan boy who emigrates to Chicago in his adulthood. Each story has it's own separate place in the young man's life, each on a different topic and scarcely referencing one another as if they were in different realities almost.

But I do have to say, all of these stories are like retellings of a bittersweet memory and I really don't care for the person the character is. 

(view spoiler)[In the first story, he makes bad decisions and has poor taste in friends. He makes friends with an American man who's a drug addict and obviously up to all sorts of illegal shit in Africa. I know he's sixteen in the story, but we've all been sixteen and most of us, I'm pretty sure, have not made friends with drug-addicted illegal arms dealers.

In the second story, he drunkenly follows women around a dark city at night in the hope of getting laid and hands a birth control pill to a married woman across the hall from his hotel room. As a woman, this made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. I'm not sure why he felt the need to record a story about this man doing this.

In the third story, where he's less of an awful person, it details the decline of a poet he didn't actually like much as a person or as an author but desperately wanted the approval of. When he didn't get that approval, he stopped writing poetry. Eventually the poet he respected deteriorates into drunken stupors and crazed madness, encouraged by the war that the character fled from before it began and used to his advantage in America.

In the fourth story, he's a magazine subscription salesman and he uses the anger and grief of an unhappy family to sell magazine subscriptions to a priest who's crying about the young man living with him.

In the fifth story, it really doesn't revolve around the main character of the other stories. Instead, it's told as a third person perspective story for the most part. His piece of shit poker buddy takes in a refugee of the war, treats him like shit, and the main character does nothing despite knowing how awful the man is that the refugee is living with. He doesn't even warn him. The story ends with the man being punched so hard his eye pops out of his socket.

In the sixth story, American Commando, he and his friends spend months hurling glass and molotv cocktails at construction workers because it's the only thing they can think of doing when their usual play spot is demolished and paved over for a construction site. Seriously, even children are more empathetic than this piece of shit main character and his war-like friends. I'm surprised they didn't end up in prison. (hide spoiler)]

The fifth and seventh stories are the most bearable, but even so the character is self-absorbed and uninteresting. The stories are strange, dark, and meaningless to me. The nameless narrator is not a person I would ever want to be friends with. And, actually, all of the people that he had been friends with at some point seemed to be horrible people or authors who entirely ignore him as a person and as a professional (I don't blame them.).

I will say the vocabulary and the nostalgic but melancholy voice of the whole book made it an interesting read. It's almost haunting, in a way. But this is not a fun book. In fact, there is very little humor in it at all - no comic relief, no happiness, no joy. The voice of every story is that same weirdly sad memory of what once was for the narrator. 

If these were meant to be joyful moments, I hope I never have to meet a man such as the narrator.

Love and Obstacles Stories

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