THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS: A Novel
by Aleksandar Hemon
MCD. 353 pages, $28.
FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Aleksandar Hemon believes in the transcendent power of an enduring passionate love to allow one to survive the world’s horrors and indignities. This belief is what drives his new novel, The World and All That It Holds. The story is relayed to us by a mysterious narrator, who speaks in a strange sort of haunting and old-fashioned prose. Hemon keeps our eyes glued to his two homosexual lovers throughout the narrative as they struggle to remain afloat in a world at war.
We quickly meet the unforgettable Rafael Pinto, a Bosnian Sephardic Jew who loves poetry and runs his father’s apothecary in Sarajevo while dreaming about the possibility of social justice.
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