Name: The Book of My Lives
Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780374115739

Aleksandar Hemon

Essays pay tribute to the two different cities of the author's youth--Sarajevo, until the city came under siege, and then Chicago, where he and his family started a new life, leaving behind everything they had ever known.

The Book of My Lives

Greg Talbot

Disjointed essays Hemon pens on revolutionary politics, displacement from Sarajevo to Chicago and relationship struggles. There are a lot of little moments that stand out, whether it be Hemon's reflecctions of early tribal beahvior - staking out the raja (building complex) as kids do in their imagination. And there is a particular pall of sadness and loneliness to be away from his country of origin...seeing bombed out grocery supermarkets and hearing about his street being renamed "sniper's alley". The last chapter is particularly brutal.<br /><br />I just didn't connect with the writing in general. The Bukowski, world-weary straight forwardness did not illuminate a larger view or perspective. 

Derek Barlas

Book of essays - slow at first but really enjoyed it. Being a Bosnian, there was lots of content on the Bosnian War.

Stephen Schenkenberg

Love this scene-setting opening to "The Lives of Grandmasters":

I do not know how old I was when I learned to play chess. I could not have been older than eight, because I still have a chessboard on whose side my father inscribed, with a soldering iron, “Saša Hemon 1972.” I loved the board more than chess — it was one of the first things I owned. Its materiality was enchanting to me: the smell of burnt wood that lingered long after my father had branded it; the rattle of the thickly varnished pieces inside, the smacking sound they made when I put them down, the board’s hollow wooden echo. I can even recall the taste — the queen’s tip was pleasantly suckable; the pawns’ round heads, not unlike nipples, were sweet. The board is still at our place in Sarajevo, and, even if I haven’t played a game on it in decades, it is still my most cherished possession, providing incontrovertible evidence that there once lived a boy who used to be me.

The Book of My Lives

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