It isn’t long before Pinto is conscripted into the Austrian-Hungarian army, serving as a medic as his platoon fights off barbarous Russian Cossacks and an offensive that kills millions in Eastern Europe.
The business isn’t far from the street where one day Archduke Franz Ferdinand is being greeted by crowds outside looking on, Pinto becomes witness to the archduke’s assassination - which spells the beginning of the first World War. The World begins in Sarajevo in 1914, where a young man, Pinto, has returned home after studying medicine in Vienna he’s been left with his deceased father’s apothecary to run. Nearly a century elapses in a lyrically written, epic tale traveling the Eastern side of the globe, one so dense in detail that it might have been twice the size - you admire the economy, its concentrated 330-or-so-page heft. The world here is many things indeed: a story of hardship with the sweep of novels by Mark Helprin or Michael Ondaatje a romance between two men that channels Annie Proulx episodes of stark grisliness found in the likes of Blood Meridian. Wasn’t it Robert Louis Stevenson who proposed that “we should all be happy as kings,” given the expansive nature of life on this planet? Well, Stevenson never met Aleksandar Hemon, or read his cinematic new novel, The World and All That It Holds, in which his assertions about happiness are sorely challenged, even when love figures strongly. The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon. Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel is simply dizzying, filled with texture, startling imagery, language in multiple tongues (keep Google within reach!), and it succeeds in most every respect.
0 kommentar(er)
