Expatriate games
A review by Art Winslow
Wartime Sarajevo, Bosnia, early 1990s, as reported by a character in Aleksandar Hemon's novel The Lazarus Project: The electricity, out for months at a stretch, would return intermittently, bringing the lights and radios and televisions that had been left on suddenly to life. But the power grid aided the snipers and artillery batteries besieging the city, who "could pound us and kill us at night as well, picking out all the lit targets." And so, says Rora, a photographer, "We dreamt of light but hoped for darkness." The siege of Sarajevo is the dark cloud that seems ever to drift through the atmosphere of Hemon's fiction, sometimes in the historical periphery, sometimes in the story's present on American television, sometimes in the adjustments of emigre life, casting its shadow on tales that might otherwise read as family comedy out to trace human foibles and -- what shall we call it? -- the existential oddity of being. He writes books of laughter and non-forgetting.
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