GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Our Country Friends
Not a Hemonite yet? I envy you your very first encounter with one of the world's greatest writers." From Sarajevo to Shanghai, every sentence, every paragraph is a sensuous and often hilarious delight. "Hemonites rejoice! The master is back and he has forged a remarkable tale of love and war alongside his own 20th Century Silk Road. Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman-with the occasional opiatic interlude-that keeps him going. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul a charismatic storyteller Pinto’s protector and lover. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can’t put in perspective.Īnd then the world explodes. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.Īs the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents.
The World and All That It Holds-in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical glory-showcases Aleksandar Hemon’s celebrated talent at its pinnacle.
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