ALEKSANDAR HEMON THREE-WAY

Good in Beds

Sundays are for showing off all my past loves I’ve enjoyed in bed (the BOOKS, ya pervs), and keeping it light, but it’s difficult for me to keep it simple and fun when I start thinking of the marvelous works of Sasha Hemon.  I knew him early on, you know, and he had an office next to mine for a minute, and his true story is as true as all of his books—the many lives, all wonderfully without closure.  His stories, like his characters, go on and on, the way Chekhov’s characters go outside our knowledge and keep living lives without us. 

I have a dream of hosting an entire literary conference where we would discuss the last chapter of his novel Nowhere Man.  One time, a student we were both teaching in the same term was complaining about something that hadn’t even happened, and, with the face on the ancient ruined statue of a Mayan warrior, he quelled her rage by saying with all those Slavic syllables, “Bernadette, you are like a little ball of sunshine.”  These inscriptions are very much a part of his love and humor and quelling of my silly rage—deadpan, deep, and enthusiastic.  The very best kind of whoopee.   

If you have never read a Hemon book, let me invite you in with a basic: his story “Islands” in The Question of Bruno, which is a kind of impassive narrative that may or may not be from his childhood about a trip to a beautiful island in the Adriatic with a relative who may or may be a war criminal.  The story stays on the surface, so that you can imagine everything—what the child is seeing, thinking, deciding, and hiding.  

Thank you, Aleksandar Hemon—your glorious prose is like a Cossack in the sack.

The Sorge Spy Ring