Semezdin Mehmedinović

The book proudly announces itself to be a novel on its cover so I will call it that. Without that clue, one could have called it a collection of 3 connected novellas. Or a memoir. Semezdin Mehmedinović writes about a man called Semezdin Mehmedinović - not exactly the author but not exactly an invented person either. The best term for what this novel is is autofiction - that genre sitting between autobiography and fiction which always confuses people trying to figure out what parts are true and which are not. Separating them is impossible; believing all to be true is probably unwise.

The novel is built from 3 stories: 'Me'med', "Red Bandana" and "Snowflake". They read like episodes in the life of the same people so they kind of form a novel but each of them also reads independent enough to function as a story.

The story opens on 2 November 2010 when the narrator suffers from a heart attack at the age of 50. While waiting for the ambulance and then being transported to the hospital and then into recovery and back home, he muses about life, memories and his experiences. The family fled Bosnia during the war and through all 3 parts of the novel, the current actions are interspersed with memories of Bosnia before and during the war, memories of life as new immigrants and all kinds of musings about art (mainly Bosnian), life and the universe.

The second part of the novel skips 5 years ahead to April 2015 and gets Semezdin back to Phoenix (the first place the family lived in the States in) to meet his son Harun, a photographer, for a trip through the desert so that Harun can do some work. The story of the past continues but the musings about life are replaced with musings about fathers, sons and families.

A year later, the third story picks up when just as with the first part, the family is in distress. But this time it is Sanja, the wife who helped him survive the heart attack. And unlike that first attack which got his heart, the stroke she suffers seems to slowly steal her memories. So the narrator ties together all the stories he had been telling us, all the memories and thinks about memories and life and what is really important in life.

It is a heart-felt novel which matches pretty closely the author's life. Some parts are very hard to read - the Bosnian part of the story can be hard to understand and accept - humanity is just messed up.

These days the author lives in Sarajevo again - and during all the years of his exile, he never stopped writing in Bosnian. He explains that in the novel as well - while talking about memories, language and life.

The novel can sound a bit unorganized and almost scattered but at the end what emerges is the story of a life - marked by tragedies but held together by love, nostalgia and family.

Recommended.… (mais)

It doesn't matter if it's "a novel," as the cover says it is, or a memoir, as it seems to be, or if it's that murky hybrid some call "autofiction." The narrator / main character / author is Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinovic, who describes in three linked sections ("Me'med," "Red Bandanna," and "Snowflake") three momentous events in the life of his family. In the first, he suffers a heart attack. The second is a road trip he takes with his thorny, gifted photographer son through Arizona and Death Valley, and the third is his wife Sanja's stroke, which damages her ability to remember. In all three, Mehmedinovic muses gravely on the sinuous intertwining of memory, exile, home and homelessness, love, family, language, mortality, connections and disconnections with places and other people. It meanders, it wanders, there is no propulsion of plot, but rather repeated themes, and anecdotes retold in slightly different ways or highlighting different details, that tie the stories together. He notices, observes, describes and ponders. Whether or not any part of it is "true" or "really happened" exactly as he says doesn't even matter. His attentive, precise language - without elaboration or literary decoration - gives it all the truth it needs.

"Snowflake" in particular moved me, in its clear-eyed and acid depiction of the hospital experience (and the contrast between his own experience as a patient and Sanja's - and his own as her "guardian" and support - is dramatic), and in how the love he and his wife share must change and renew in the aftermath of her stroke. "When I get home from work, we have coffee and remember the past. Every day. And I always hope she will have woken up that morning and recalled everything." This does not happen. Instead, as Sanja observes, "Everyone else knows more about my life than I do. I'm a stranger to myself."

Thanks to "her Semezdin" and his beautiful words, they are not entirely strangers to us, and perhaps will help us avoid becoming strangers to one another.… (mais)

Semezdin Mehmedinovic's MY HEART calls itself a novel, but it reads like a memoir in the form of three lengthy essays. It certainly appears to be autobiographical, or "autofiction" - is this a brand new genre? Well, the narrator himself (who has the same name as the author) says, "I have no biography," then goes on to tell us he has -

"described almost everything important that had happened to me in my prose and poems, turning almost my entire life into fiction. It was now a collection of illusions, fairly unreliable, so that it would be hard to construct a factual account of my life."

The first essay describes his heart attack at fifty, his treatment & how he dealt with it. The second concerns a road trip he made with his adult son, Harun, a professional photographer, across the western desert and a visit to Phoenix and their first home in America, where they'd arrived as refugees from the war in Bosnia. In it we learn something of both the narrator and his son, perhaps summed up by the statement, "Is there anything in the world more complicated than the father-son relationship?" The third essay concerns his wife's stroke and everything that followed, as he tried to take care of her and restore her memories of their life together.

In each essay we learn more details of their lives in both Bosnia (before and during the war) and the United States. (They lived in the U.S. for twenty years.) The truth is, there's not a lot of plot or forward momentum in the book. But it's filled with interesting little bits of how Mehmedinovic thinks, how he sees the world and understands life. It moves forward, backward, and even sideways in frequent small digressions. And I liked that about it. I could relate. For instance this, about writing and books that might go unread - "Books are lonelier than people."

Or this, about nostalgia, childhood and roads not taken -

"While nostalgia is an emotion I connect with a concrete time: my late childhood, that sensitive adolescent phase when we have an infinite number of paths before us, but a few years later, when we reduce our choices to one, we feel a yearning for the time in which we could have chosen from among many different possibilities. That's nostalgia for me."

In another example of this sideways kinda thing, he speaks of a fedora he has taken to wearing while he writes.

"Every day now i go to my desk in my pajamas with the hat on my head, that's now my working uniform, because I started writing again when I was wearing it."

I get that. I have a particular hat I wear to write in - a baseball cap from the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis. His fedora, my ball cap.

And again, when he remembers the difficult relationship his wife had with her late father and how he has come back to haunt her as she tries to regain her memory.

"... when he left, she didn't miss him. We're now on the verge of old age, but one doesn't stop being a child at fifty ... She woke up a little while ago as a little five year-old girl who had blamed herself fifty years earlier because her daddy hadn't come home for days."

He's right. We don't stop being children at any special age. And maybe father-daughter relationships are equally complicated.

Or, one more sideways digression, in which he visits a book store for the first time in months, because "I need to breathe in the smell of paper, for it to restore my balance ..." Indeed. As a lifelong booklover, I understood that need.

A good book, filled with small tidbits of humor & wisdom about all the various vicissitudes of life. Translated beautifully from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth, it gives you much to chew on. I enjoyed it very much and will recommend it highly to anyone who likes a quiet, thoughtful read.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mais)