The Question of Bruno

Aleksandar Hemon's debut, The Question of Bruno, is a challenging, and innovative, contribution to the literature of modern war and exile. "For Sarajevo"; "For my wife": the book's double dedication suggests the scope--at once political and intimate--of these eight complex stories set between Chicago and Bosnia. "Sarajevo is a catless city," writes Hemon in "A Coin". "It is so because people couldn't feed them, or couldn't take them along when they were fleeing, or their owners were killed. Hence the dogs that couldn't be fed or taken along hung them down and devour them." This is the kind of detail--the relation between prey and predator, killing and survival, death and abandonment--that structures these various explorations of family and war, history and story, writing and politics. "Most of this story", we read in "The Accordian", a very short story about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, "is a consequence of irresponsible imagination and shameless speculation." How far can that judgement be brought to bear on any fiction that deals with the history of nations at war? With the struggle to find the words to tell the truth of any life? "This story was written in Chicago (where I live) on the subway, after a long day of arduous work as a parking assistant, AD 1996." Can the reader trust this as the voice of a working man, a man in exile, or is he or she merely caught up in an "Exchange of Pleasant Words" (to coin the title of another story in this collection). Hemon's questions are germane to the contemporary European literature with which his writing is most likely to be associated; but the setting is also new, part of the vigour, and confrontation, of these stories. --Vicky Lebeau


Genre: Literary Fiction