REVIEWS
A broken world and the love that endures
Displacement, homelessness, rootlessness – all themes that were ingrained in our histories and conflicts of the 20th century. Aleksandar Hemon’s writing underlines the continuing importance of those themes, even when depicting the wanderings of the people and the consequences of the events from the last century.
His new novel The World and All That It Holds begins, strikingly, in 1914 Sarajevo, with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. From the street corner, Pinto looks on perplexed, as his life and the life of his world is transformed, destroyed and reborn in the succeeding years. With his secret lover Osman, he is carried away by the tides of war, first as a prisoner to the steppes after the Russian Revolution, then to Tashkent,…
