The World and All That It Holds

 

Rafael Pinto, a young Bosnian Sephardic Jewish doctor, steps away from his father’s pharmacy to see Archduke Franz Ferdinand shot and the world irrevocably altered. Plunged headfirst into the horrors of war, Pinto ends up finding the love of his life in a fellow soldier, Osman. Though enemy soldiers and political intrigue threatens them at every turn, together they fight for survival and a shared future.

 

Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel is among his most ambitious, spanning not only decades and continents but languages as well. Though written primarily in English, The World and All That It Holds mixes in untranslated Bosnian, German, and even Ladino (“Spanjol”). To further complicate matters, Pinto is also a habitual opium user, and the line between the story’s reality and fever dream/hallucination can be tenuous.

 

All of this makes for a challenging read, but for the patient, there are rewards: the tenderness of Pinto and Osman’s relationship (and, later, that of Pinto and his adopted daughter Rahela’s) amid the savagery of their circumstances, their striking contrasts (Pinto is introspective, soulful, and sensitive but also downbeat while Osman is brave and bold, and whether in the flesh or in imagined memory, constantly an encouraging presence), richly rendered settings (from the Sarajevo of a century ago to Shanghai on the cusp of a Japanese invasion), and Hemon’s distinctively lyrical prose.

 

There are, however, frustrations as well, the biggest one of which is the intrusion of an author-narrator commenting on the historicity of Pinto’s tale. Granted, The World and All That It Holds is steeped in the telling of folktales, and so adding a meta layer makes sense, but it also makes for a somewhat incongruous presence, especially in the epilogue. A further disruption comes courtesy of a British spy who crosses paths with Pinto and seems imported from a Graham Greene novel, an amusingly larger-than-life character who nevertheless seems tonally out-of-place here.

 

The World and All That It Holds is far from an ideal entry point to Hemon’s work, and those well versed in it may miss some of his more constrained earlier efforts, but there is still plenty to appreciate in the spectacle he’s created here.