Product Description

A new book of linked stories by the author of the National Book Award finalist The Lazarus Project.

Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation- and his MacArthur "genius grant"-for his short stories, and he returns to the form with a powerful collection of linked stories that stands with The Lazarus Project as the best work of his celebrated career. A few of the stories have never been published before; the others have appeared in The New Yorker, and several of those have also been included in The Best American Short Stories. All are infused with the dazzling, astonishingly creative prose and the remarkable, haunting autobiographical elements that have distinguished Hemon as one of the most original and illustrious voices of our time.

What links the stories in Love and Obstacles is the narrator, a young man who-like Hemon himself-was raised in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories of Love and Obstacles are about that coming of age and the complications-the obstacles-of growing up in a Communist but cosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in young adulthood. But because it's Aleksandar Hemon, the stories extend far beyond the immigrant experience; each one is punctuated with unexpected humor and spins out in fabulist, exhilarating directions, ultimately building to an insightful, often heartbreaking conclusion. Woven together, these stories comprise a book that is, genuinely, as cohesive and powerful as any fiction- achingly human, charming, and inviting.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #376439 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .70" h x 5.40" w x 8.50" l, .72 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594488641
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bosnian-born Hemon (The Lazarus Project) again beautifully twists the language in this collection of eight powerful and disquieting stories. The 1992 Bosnian war colors in the background of all the tales, whose settings range from Africa to Chicago and Sarajevo. Arranged chronologically, all but one feature a Hemon-like narrator named Bogdan, first met as a surly teenager during his diplomat father's assignment in Zaire, where he's happily corrupted by a degenerate American espionage agent. In each successive story, Bogdan recalls the surreal and salient experiences of his life: his youth with his ironically depicted family; his early determination to be a poet; his accidental sojourn in America, where he was caught after the commencement of hostilities in Bosnia; and his return to a cesspool of insignificant, drizzly suffering, where he has a transformative night interviewing a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. Hemon arranges words like gems in a necklace. A necktie is stretched across the chair seat, like a severed tendon; a car is stickered with someone else's thought; a character's teeth are like organ pipes. Writing with steely control and an antic eye, Hemon has assembled another extraordinary work. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
"Steeped ... in male ego [and] sexuality" (Houston Chronicle), Hemon's wry, robust, and entertaining stories bring to light the immigrant's hunger for identity -- caught between two worlds but truly belonging to neither -- and the writer's hunger for validation. Poised between two worlds himself, Hemon's vantage point and marvelous flair for the English language yield deliciously sardonic cultural observations and ask insightful questions about the meaning of family and home. Critics were especially moved by his portrait of his eccentric father and the growing chasm between father and son. Though the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel considered Hemon's subject matter trite and uninspired, most critics, in spite of a few complaints -- including some awkward language, a sporadic anti-American undercurrent, and forced connections among stories -- were pleased by Hemon's return to familiar terrain.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Beginning with the lancing stories in The Question of Bruno (2000) and extending into his tour de force, The Lazarus Project (2008), MacArthur fellow Hemon has been grappling with home, hate, and war within the crushing and ludicrous adventures of young Bosnian men growing up in doomed Yugoslavia, then plunging into the confounding demands of exile in America. In this riveting cycle of linked stories-within-stories, Hemon’s wannabe-poet narrator is abruptly introduced to geopolitical sleaze in Kinshasa, where his diplomat father is posted in 1983. Back home in Sarajevo, he runs amok on his first solo journey and sits at the feet of a celebrated poet, fueled by both reverence and resentment. He then travels to America just before war breaks out and discovers that obstacles to love loom everywhere. Possessed of a phenomenal gift for translating feelings into concrete imagery in masterfully structured tales that end in stunning crescendos, Hemon infuses everything, from a freezer to bees in a hive, with barbed insights into our instinct for aggression, longing for connection, and unquenchable need to tell our stories, whether in poems, letters, drunken orations, or confessions to strangers. Hemon is a world-class writer of seismic depth, riptide humor, wine-dark language, and unflinching candor. --Donna Seaman

Customer Reviews

A Young Man's Ideals Tested by the World's Heart of Darkness
If there is a motif in these eight wonderfully crafted short stories which all have an autobiographical feel of a young man's spiritual and intellectual growing pains, it is taken from one of the narrator's poems: He describes his longing to love, to find transcendence through art and romance, constantly at war with a nihilistic world. Hence the book's title Love and Obstacles.

In one of the collection's most powerful stories, "Stairway to Heaven," the sixteen-year-old narrator, from Bosnia, lives for a summer in the Congo where he is befriended by a perverse, slimy character who exposes the narrator to a grotesque world with no moral boundaries and what becomes the "Heart of Darkness." This rich 30-page story is worthy of a novel and is my favorite story in the collection.

In "Everything," the narrator, now seventeen, must perform the errand of buying a refrigerator for his family and risks his life to do so as he must navigate through a world of criminals, hustlers, and other brutes.

In "The Conductor," the narrator befriends a poet, is inspired and maddened by his poetry and finally must witness the poet's decomposition as a human being.

In sum, the stories dramatize the intense idealistic imagination of a young man seeking refuge in literature and art and love who finds the world's darkness encroaching on his bubble and he succeeds at giving us a powerful voice to render this conflict.

Reading Hemon's masterful stories, I am reminded of some of the best stories by Chekhov and Isaac Babel. A modern writer who captures some of the aforementioned themes is David Bezmozgis' collection Natasha: And Other Stories. Read the title story. You won't forget it.

Outstanding writer
"Love and Obstacles" is a collection of short stories that read like a novella. There is a chronological development that runs through the eight short pieces (the book is only 210 pages long), as well as a maturation that makes this more than eight episodic narrative atoms. Hemon portrays himself as self-centered in all eight stories, but that self-indulgence progresses from the slouchy narcissism of adolesence in the first piece, "Stairway to Heaven", to the awareness of a writer's craft in the final piece "The Noble Truths of Suffering". This is a superb short read.

Amazing Voice Brings New Worlds to Life
As a young writer, Aleksander Hemon has already accumulated a lifetime of writer accolades: he's a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant recipient, he's been a Guggenheim fellow, and both of his recent books ("The Lazarus Project" and "Nowhere Man") have been short-listed for the National Book Award. So expectations for "Love and Obstacles," a collection of short stories, was high. Aleksander Hemon did not disappoint.

It takes a little while to immerse yourself in the autobiographical world of Bosnian Hemon if you've never experienced his writing before. Somewhat jarring, too, in this volume is that the first story is set in Africa, where he tells his own "Heart of Darkness" tale about disaffected youth and a rogue CIA type. It's a good story, but once the book moves on to other, more typical Hemon fare--stories of Sarajevo, transplantation to North America, and stories of family life--it's easier to see what all the fuss is about.

Hemon writes with humor and pathos. He is able to poke fun at his own writerly ambitions, as well as those of his father (who writes the story of his life via a movie script that he then wants his son to act out), a Bosnian poet who haunts the cafes of Sarajevo (and mistakes the Hemon character for a conductor), and a visiting Pulitzer Prize winner whose life's trauma (Vietnam) mirrors that of Hemon's (the fall of Sarajevo). It's all fodder for the vagaries of life and the impossibility of living in an absurd world when you aspire to see its truth and beauty.

Two factors will leap out when readers attempt to decipher just what it is that makes this writing so potent. One is the way in which the writer is able to bring his characters to life. In each of the eight stories told in "Love and Obstacles," the characters are larger than life, strong in personality but vulnerable and frail, too, from the life experiences they have suffered through (yet are reluctant to reveal). The second strength Hemon brings to his writing is his unexpected use of language. The twists and turns, the play on songs and other cultural motifs, the odd phrasing that cuts to the quick--these are the heart and soul of "Love and Obstacles."

Finally, the key turn that brings most stories in "Love and Obstacles" to their climax is done with a poetic phrasing that's almost startling. Caught up in the humor of the situation, readers don't see the vulnerable punch line coming. It's magic when it arrives. And that is the reason Aleksander Hemon is worth reading.