The World and All That It Holds
The narrative territory of The World and All That It Holds stretches from modern Ukraine to Shanghai and encompasses armed conflicts from the Great War to the Second Sino-Japanese War. Making his way through this combat-riven wasteland is Bosnian-Jewish everyman Rafael Pinto, displaced from his home in Sarajevo by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the ensuing cataclysm. He encounters a world where war has become normal, as an ever-renewing cycle of violence proves devastating to both humans and nature.
A pharmacist turned army surgeon, Pinto knows no respite from the killing, apart from hallucinogenic drugs. But something marvelous happens when he falls in love with handsome Muslim soldier Osman Karisik, who uses his talent for sex and storytelling to draw Pinto under his spell. However, since death conquers every obstacle in this novel, Pinto soon learns to do without his beloved—or does he? In any case, he looks after Osman’s daughter Rahela, whom his friend has asked him to bring to safety. Other stories intertwine with Pinto’s, such as the memoir of Major Moser-Etherington, who appears straight out of Kipling’s Kim.
Finally, the idea emerges that this could be a China-box of a novel, a clever, literary puzzle. In a historical novel that invites comparisons with the 20th-century classics The Magic Mountain and Ulysses, Hemon’s superb, challenging technique evokes the stream-of-consciousness tradition, where the narrative voice issues from the depths of the experiencing psyche, rather than from the reasoning, ordering mind. Feelings and sense perceptions take precedence over the sober recounting of events, and instead of a coherent plot, the reader is confronted with a fascinating, Bosch-style canvas depicting the vast Eurasian battlefields, contested grounds long before, and after, 1914. A tour de force that places Hemon among the greats.
