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Espionage and exile
This dazzling collection introduces Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian immigrant who may be his generation's Nabokov.
By George Packer
[04/27/00]

Reviews
"Wanderlust: A History of Walking" by Rebecca Solnit
A delightful and mind-expanding look at one of the activities that makes us human.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[04/27/00]

Interview
Knuckle-puller makes good
George Saunders talks about the bumpy road that led to his strange but far-from-implausible fiction.
By Laura Miller
[04/26/00]

It's a theme-park life
In George Saunders' savage, soulful satires, ordinary people face real crises in a disturbingly artificial America.
By Chris Lehmann
[04/26/00]

Reviews
"Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism" by Daniel Harris
With the malice of a gifted comic, an angry author argues that our "personal" tastes are something we were sold by advertising.
By Greg Villepique
[04/26/00]

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And Hemon has been good to English, as well, as the recent publication of his short-story collection, "The Question of Bruno," conclusively proves. It's a book full of peculiar and yet startlingly apt phrases ("the pungent, sneezeful greenness of green onions," for example). It's also a book of shifting, elusive moods, whether Hemon is writing about a childhood enthusiasm for the Russian master spy Richard Sorge; the sentimental, boozy expansiveness of a Bosnian family reunion; the absurd, horror of life in Sarajevo during the war; or the almost psychedelically vivid perceptions of a recent immigrant who sees American objects in starker relief partly because he doesn't know the names of any of them. Salon reached Hemon by phone at his home in Chicago, where he regards the publication of "The Question of Bruno" with unflappable aplomb.

The Question of Bruno By Aleksandar Hemon Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 231 pages Fiction Also Today Espionage and exile This dazzling collection introduces Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian immigrant who may be his generation's Nabokov. By George Packer Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

You were writing fiction before you came to the U.S., but since your recent work is so much about loss and culture shock, I assume it must have been about something else. What?

It was some kind of minimalist shit. The stories were kind of pared down, a response to what was going on around me and so kind of nihilistic, too. They were not very good. A book of my short stories was supposed to come out [in Bosnia] in the summer of '92. Stopping that was the best thing the war ever did. They were a symptom of helplessness. There was so much overwhelming stuff around there was really no point in writing stories. They had this inherent meaninglessness that I couldn't overcome. One of them was about Kafka's death. It was dreadful. Here I was in my 20s writing about the meaning of life and death.

Is that something you think people in their 20s can't do?

I'm not sure we can ever really do it, but in the 20s one is inherently prevented from doing that.

How are your new stories different to you?

I'm happy with them because something has been resolved while I was writing them. I understood something writing these stories, even if 50 years from now they just look like babbling.

You have a close, almost obsessive attention to detail and to capturing the qualities of objects and places, which isn't surprising since you're often trying to hold on to a lost time and a lost world, particularly when you're writing about Sarajevo. Yet even when you seem to be yearning for the past, you tend to pick out things to describe that are gross, even disgusting.

Most people who are in a comfortable situation of having a continuous life, they imagine their lives in the best possible way, even if the objects in that life weren't exactly like that. But if you look at it closely, if you have to remember because if you don't things may disappear, you remember in a kind of panic and you don't know what may show up on the surface of your memory. People who have involuntary memories of things like child abuse -- I don't have that, but I'd bet they remember details very vividly. Smells and touches and textures. Something that doesn't allow them to remember it comfortably. There's a man pissing under my window right now.

That's like the kind of detail I was talking about.

He's also pushing an ice cream cart. Serendipity, the mother of knowledge.

When I remember my childhood, I remember being close to the ground. When we're kids we deal with those things because we're close to them. We have to be trained to recognize disgusting, abject things. My hands were dirty until I was 15, when I was taught that you don't touch earthworms. Well, maybe not 15. That's a little late. I still toy with them. Those were fascinating things because you're not supposed to touch them. There's this purification of life, including your own body. It becomes this clean, controllable object. All abject things about it, and by extension all abject things in the world, are presumably not supposed to be there. But if you want to remember the world, it's hard to do it without abject things.

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