Such is Aleksandar Hemon's bountiful gift for language that the Bosnian-American writer has drawn comparison with Nabokov, that genius of word selection. Both novelists began writing in English relatively late, after first establishing themselves in their native tongues. But as Hemon has noted himself, it's not this linguistic feat that most unites the two writers. Rather it's a sensibility – at once mordant and exuberant, comic and subtle – that Hemon traces to a distinctive Slavic outlook.
The Bosnian has said that he writes "sad books for humorous people" and "humorous books for sad people". The Book of My Lives is a thoughtfully humorous and profoundly sad memoir-cum-collection of essays that explores Hemon's first life, growing up in the lively cultural atmosphere of Sarajevo before the onset of the war in Bosnia, and his second life as a sort of accidental exile in America, where he was effectively trapped in 1992 when the war broke out.
Hemon does with Sarajevo what Orhan Pamuk has done for Istanbul, which is to say he brings to life a city in ways that have little to do with its received image. The tragic story of Sarajevo, particularly the siege by Serbian forces, is one that is familiar from television news reports. Although Hemon takes us through the brute madness of the siege, his Sarajevan streets are populated not with faceless victims but people with plans and ideas and dogs, all of which Hemon has the novelist's ability to make vital.
Perhaps the most disturbing chapter in this section concerns Hemon's former poetry professor, Nikola Koljevic, an enormously learned figure – "with the long, slender fingers of a piano player" – whom the aspiring writer greatly admired. Koljevic could quote Shakespeare in English and seemed to Hemon the very embodiment of high culture.
Yet when Radovan Karadzic began whipping up sectarian hatred, and preparing the destruction of Sarajevo, it was Professor Koljevic who sat encouragingly by his side at press conferences. Hemon does not overplay the dreadful irony of the aesthete turned warmonger. That's not his style. Instead he captures the disjunction perfectly in a deadpan last line about the professor's later suicide: "He had to shoot twice, his long piano-player finger apparently having trembled on the unwieldy trigger."
This is typical Hemon, an expert in subversive deflation. His beautifully assembled vignettes are often digressive but they invariably come back to a particular point and it's usually not the point that you were expecting. Because Hemon, who witnessed the wilful ruination of his famously civilised hometown, knows that life doesn't proceed in straight narrative lines.
Never was this truth more harrowingly confirmed than in the final chapter of the book, which records the death of his infant daughter, Isabel, following the removal of a brain tumour. It's an astonishing piece of writing, and it's hard to imagine that any parent has ever dealt more powerfully or affectingly with the end of his child's life. Hemon retains an unblinking eye for the telling detail in circumstances in which most people would struggle to look at the world at all. Nor does he allow himself or the reader the indulgence of sentimentality, even as he describes the childish coping mechanism of his other daughter's imaginary friend, which he realises is the same process he employs as a novelist "to understand what was hard for me to understand".
As he notes, the ready platitude for such nightmare scenarios is that words fail us. But words did not fail Hemon. Like Nabokov, he is a writer who knows how to make words succeed in the most unpromising places.
