The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Gabrielle de Cuir, Vikas Adam

Overview

In this stylistically adventurous, brilliantly funny tour de force-the most highly acclaimed debut since Nathan Englander's-Aleksandar Hemon writes of love and war, Sarajevo and America, with a skill and imagination that are breathtaking.

A love affair is experienced in the blink of an eye as the Archduke Ferdinand watches his wife succumb to an assassin's bullet. An exiled writer, working in a sandwich shop in Chicago, adjusts to the absurdities of his life. Love letters from war-torn Sarajevo navigate the art of getting from point A to point B without being shot. With a sure-footed sense of detail and life-saving humor, Aleksandar Hemon examines the overwhelming events of history and the effect they have on individual lives. These heartrending stories bear the unmistakable mark of an important international writer.

Editorial Reviews

Sven Birkerts

The sound is ailing, so you wiggle knobs, jiggle wires, finally just smack the top of the speaker and—voilà—the air is suddenly full with the sound you wanted. I feel that way reading Alekaksander Hemon's new collection The Question of Bruno...The man is a maestro, and conjurer, a channeler of universes...As vivid prose as you will find anywhere this year, and as heartbreaking.
—Esquire

Talk Magazine

A powerful collection of stories linked by their setting: the author's native Sarajevo.

David Utterson

The Question of Bruno's seven short stories and a novella provide the reader with a curious mixture of fact and fiction, which blends into a successful and mostly original whole...This is an impressive book, which manipulates language in a way that both chills and satisfies.,br>&3151;Times Literary Supplement

Richard Eder

Several of the shorter pieces are so good as to make the reader feel certain of having discovered not just an extraordinary story but an extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary. In retrospect, you begin to worry about what could so easily have been lost. What if Hemon had stayed in Sarajevo and suffered a momentary cramp -- nonwriter's -- crossing Sniper's Alley?
—The New York Times Book Review

The New Yorker

Like Conrad's, Hemon's prose often makes the most of emphatically discordant notes: an initially incongruous word comes to seem a perfect choice.

Kirkus Reviews

Uneven but not uninteresting stories from first-timer Hemon, a Conradian figure, an exile from Sarajevo who has lived in Chicago for eight years, remaking himself into an American writer. The collection is comprised of seven stories and a novella, `Blind Joszef Pronek & Dead Souls`—and as the title of that longer work suggests—some of the author's often cynical humor can be traced back to other East European writers like Gogol and Kafka. But there are also traces of influences as various as Borges and Calvino in the puzzle-joke story `The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders.` Hemon seems fascinated with trying to reproduce the creepy tactility of decay and, as might be expected from a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, extremes of senseless violence. At its worst, the result is a piece like `A Coin,` which recounts the suffering of the besieged civilians of Sarajevo in somewhat shopworn, overfamiliar terms unintentionally echoing the voyeurism that it accuses Western journalists of perpetrating. On the other hand, particularly in the novella, a recounting of the wanderings of a Sarajevan transplanted to Chicago at the outset of the civil war, and in `The Sorge Spy Ring,` a longish, clever mix of autobiographical reminiscence and historical fact with a totally unexpected dark ending, Hemon displays a considerable command of sudden shifts in tone, shuttling swiftly but surely between black comedy and bleak reality. The volume is shot through with a dry, deadpan humor that is clearly a defensive carapace grown in response to decades of Stalinist/Titoist falsifications and repression, as well as an understandable fascination with the grim detritus of Balkan history. Hemon'sprosesuffers occasionally from the overstudious diction of the non-native speaker, but he is clearly a writer of some promise.

Observer (London)

Like Nabokov, Hemon writes with the startling peeled vision of the outsider, weighing words as if for the first time; he shares with Kundera an ability to find grace and humor in the bleakest of circumstances. In part his book is a history lesson, but it is history felt on a human pulse. He imagines his way back into the troubled soul of his home city and tells its tales from within.”

Entertainment Weekly

That eerie half-world in which small personal dramas play out against shattering current events is the territory of Aleksandar Hemon’s assured first short-story collection, The Question of Bruno—a debut all the more impressive because the author, a native of Sarajevo, only recently learned English. Before the comparisons to Nabokov and Conrad start coming, however (and odds are they’ll come fast and furious), know this: Hemon is an original voice, and he has imagination and talent all his own…[Grade:] A.”

New Yorker

The Yugoslavian-born author came to the United States on vacation but was forced to stay when his country erupted in war. In this collection of stories, political reality is driven into everyday life like a wedge or—just as often—a knife. The most straightforward pieces benefit immensely from the fact that English is not Hemon’s native language. Like Conrad’s, his prose often makes the most of emphatically discordant notes: an initially incongruous word comes to seem a perfect choice.”

Booklist

The exile’s wrenching experiences of learning a new language and culture infuse his edgy stories with a hallucinatory intensity. Hemon handles English as though each sentence were an incendiary device, beautifully made but volatile; and each tale, loaded with painful memories and scouring observations, is an ambush on an elusive enemy…Fascinated with the meeting of memory and language, adept at conjuring states of mind, and haunted by the violence wracking his homeland, Hemon is a stoic tragedian and a brilliant satirist.”

San Francisco Chronicle

By turns terrifying, gently comic, and brutally satiric, these are stunning stories that compel the reader to view a world rendered…abruptly alien and unfamiliar.”

|Los Angeles Times

An inventive and thorny collection of interlocking narratives that has the jarring immediacy of autobiography, as if Hemon were brandishing a handheld video camera at the inchoate episodes of his life. But his artful anarchic jump-cutting is firmly grounded by the undeniable heft of history…Whether pondering the coldblooded craft of Sarajevo’s snipers or offering a Proustian joke, Hemon has an impeccable ear for the mundane ironies and bleak compromises elicited by extraordinary events.”

Esquire

The man is a maestro…As vivid a prose as you will find anywhere this year, and as heartbreaking.”

Newsday

It is surely no coincidence that the name of Joseph Conrad, another European exile whose native language is not English, is alluded to several times in Hemon’s often thrilling debut collection, The Question of Bruno. There could hardly be a better ancestor-mentor invoked. Hemon’s memoir-like stories and one novella here tell us much about the horrors of war, the confusions of identity, and the no-less-perplexing business of creating a new life in a country not your own.”

Time Out New York

The book’s language is rich, complex, sharply intelligent, and frequently funny—a pleasant surprise for readers of new fiction, and all the more astonishing considering Hemon wrote it in English, his second language.”

Newsweek

Entertaining stories about Sarajevo? Weirdly droll and heartbreaking, this debut volume deftly anatomizes a world gone wrong.”

New York Times Book Review

So good as to make the reader feel certain of having discovered not just an extraordinary story but an extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary.”

From the Publisher

Not just an extraordinary storyteller but an extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary.”–The New York Times Book Review

“By turns terrifying, gently comic and brutally satiric, these are stunning stories that compel the reader to view a world rendered ... abruptly alien and unfamiliar.”–San Francisco Chronicle

“The man is a maestro.... As vivid a prose as you will find anywhere this year, and as heartbreaking.”–Esquire

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169832631
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/15/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the revolution, steaming and steely, like a locomotive; songs about striking miners burying their dead comrades. By the time we got to the coast, I had almost lost my voice.

2

We waited for the ship on a long stone pier, which burnt the soles of my feet, as soon as I took off my sandals. The air was sweltering, saturated with sea-ozone, exhaustion, and the smell of coconut sunscreen, coming from the German tourists, already red and shellacked, lined up for a photo at the end of the pier. We saw the thin stocking of smoke on the horizon-thread, then the ship itself, getting bigger, slightly slanted sideways, like a child's drawing. I had on a round straw hat with all the seven dwarves painted on it. It threw a short, dappled shadow over my face. I had to raise my head to look at the grown-ups. Otherwise, I would look at their gnarled knees, the spreading sweat stains on their shirts and sagging wrinkles of fat on their thighs. One of the Germans, an old, bony man, got down on his knees and puked over the pier edge. The vomit hit the surface and then dispersed in different directions, like children running away to hide from the seeker. Under the wave-throbbing, ochre and maroon, island of vomit, a school of aluminum fish gathered and nibbled it peevishly.

3

The ship was decrepit, with pealing steel stairs and thin leaves of rust that could cut yourfingers on the handrails. The staircase wound upward like a twisted towel. "Welcome," said an unshaven man in a T-shirt picturing a boat with a smoke-snake, wobbling on the waves, and, above it, the sun with a U-smile and an umlaut of eyes. We sat on the upper deck and the ship leapt over humble waves, panting and belching. We passed a line of little islands, resembling car wrecks by the road, and I would ask my parents: "Is this Mljet?" and they would say: "No." From behind one of the petrified islands, shaven by a wildfire, a gust of waylaying wind attacked us, snatched the straw hat off my head and tossed it into the sea. I watched the hat teetering away, my hair pressed against my skull, like a helmet, and I understood that I would never, ever see it again. I wished to go back in time and hold on to my hat before the surreptitious whirlwind hit me in the face. The ship sped away from the hat and the hat was transformed into a beige stain on the snot-green sea. I began crying and sobbed myself to sleep. When I woke up the ship was docked and the island was Mljet.

4

Uncle Julius impressed a stern, moist kiss on my cheek—the corner of his mouth touched the corner of my mouth, leaving a dot of spit above my lip. But his lips were soft, like slugs, as if there was nothing behind to support them. As we walked away from the pier, he told us that he forgot his teeth at home, and then, so as to prove that he was telling us the truth, he grinned at me, showing me his pink gums with cinnabar scars. He reeked of pine cologne, but a whiff redolent of rot and decay escaped his insides and penetrated the fragrant cloud. I hid my face in my mother's skirt. I heard his snorting chuckle. "Can we please go back home!" I cried.

5

We walked up a dilapidated, sinuous road exuding heat. Uncle Julius's sandals clattered in a tranquilizing rhythm and I felt sleepy. There was a dense verdureless thicket alongside the road. Uncle Julius told us that there used to be so many poisonous snakes on Mljet that people used to walk in tall rubber boots all the time, even at home, and snakebites were as common as mosquito bites. Everybody used to know how to slice off the bitten piece of flesh in a split second, before the venom could spread. Snakes killed chickens and dogs. Once, he said, a snake was attracted by the scent of milk, so it curled up on a sleeping baby. And then someone heard of the mongoose, how it kills snakes with joy, and they sent a man to Africa and he brought a brood of mongooses and they let them loose on the island. There were so many snakes that it was like a paradise for them. You could walk for miles and hear nothing but the hissing of snakes and the shrieks of mongooses and the bustle and rustle in the thicket. But then the mongooses killed all the snakes and bred so much that the island became too small for them. Chickens started disappearing, cats also. There were rumors of rabid mongooses and some even talked about monster mongooses that were the result of paradisiacal inbreeding. Now they were trying to figure out how to get rid of mongooses. So that's how it is, he said, it's all one pest after another, like revolutions. Life is nothing if not a succession of evils, he said, and then stopped and took a pebble out of his left sandal. He showed the puny, gray pebble to us, as if holding irrefutable evidence that he was right.

6

He opened the gate and we walked through a small, orderly garden with stout tomato stalks like sentries alongside the path. His wife (he pointed her out to us) stood in the courtyard, her face like a loaf of bread with a small tubby potato in the middle, arms akimbo, her calves full of bruises and blood vessels on the verge of bursting, ankles swollen. She was barefoot, her big toes were crooked, taking a sudden turn, as if backing away in disgust from each other. She enveloped my head with her palms, twisted my head upward and then put her mouth over my mouth, leaving a thick layer of warm saliva, which I hastily wiped off with my shoulder. Aunt Lyudmila was her name.


From the eBook edition.

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