My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You

Two books in one: The author of Lazarus Project recounts his parents’ immigration from Sarajevo to Canada and shares memories of his childhood in Sarajevo.

“Hemon continues to chronicle his family history with abundant skill and artistry.” —A.V. Club

In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents’ immigration to Canada—of the lives that were upended by the war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, he portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother’s lonely upbringing, his father’s fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course—his parents, sister, uncles, cousins—and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians, and a few befuddled Canadians.

My Parents is Hemon at his very best, grounded in stories lovingly polished by retelling, but making them exhilarating and fresh in writing, summoning unexpected laughs in the midst of the heartbreaking narratives. This Does Not Belong to You, meanwhile, is the exhilarating, freewheeling, unabashedly personal companion to My Parents—a perfect dose of Hemon at his most dazzling and untempered in a series of beautifully distilled memories and observations and explosive, hilarious, poignant miniatures. Presented dos-à-dos with My Parents, it complements and completes a major work from a major writer.

In the words of Colum McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon is, quite frankly, the greatest writer of our generation.” Hemon has never been better than here in these pages. And the moment has never been more ready for his voice, nor has the world ever been more in need of it.

“Hemon has always played with boundaries―of places, of selves―exploring how lines that can be so porous and contingent could also matter so much . . . There’s a fatalism that suffuses ‘This Does Not Belong to You,’ an overwhelming sense of mortality and the suspicion that storytelling might never be enough. This despair is leavened by what Hemon so beautifully and concretely conveys in ‘My Parents,’ with Hemon as a middle-aged son who is carefully and movingly trying to make sense of it all.” —The New York Times

“Two very different memoirs within the same cover address memory, identity, history, and mortality from different perspectives . . . [My Parents is] a memoir of mortality, of memory, of what endures. This Does Not Belong to You is more of a series of coming-of-age fragments, some rapturously poetic . . . An incisive combination of literature that addresses the function of literature and memories that explore the meaning of memory.” —Kirkus Reviews

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Rafbók: 4 september 2024