The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

But I had already conceptualized some things and could formulate it enough to write a proposal.

I know it’s at least twelve years because I sold it on proposal to my British publisher in 2010. It is over a decade in the making it is a partial collaboration with Bosnian composer Damir Imamović’s new album it blends fiction with nonfiction conventions and mixes narrative points of view. To start, can you share a bit about the story behind The World and All that It Holds. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Our conversation covered the ethics of storytelling, who gets to tell certain stories, who gets erased as time and the world spin forward, and how language is the evolutionary tool needed to tell stories the way they need to be. In our conversation, Hemon shared his ideas of what literary fiction can do to reimagine those moments that a life cannot get back.

What keeps these three pushing onward, despite being far away from home, is the deep love they have for each other. Then finally across the Taklamakan Desert and all of China, to Shanghai where Pinto and his (and maybe Osman’s) daughter, Rahela, are refugees, much older, now witnessing the start of World War II. To the east, to Tashkent, where they are prisoners of war and eventually spies. To war, where he meets the love of his life, Osman Karišik. From that moment on, Pinto’s life is constantly pushed forward. The novel starts with Rafael Pinto, a romantic, educated, gay Sarajevan pharmacist witnessing fate-in the form of an accordion-keep someone from stopping the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, thus, World War I. Such is life and such is the lives of the protagonists in Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel, The World and All That It Holds. Whether by making the wrong choice or saying the wrong thing or being impacted by chance, time and the world continue to move further and further from that moment, and the human life impacted at that exact moment is never what it was before. Everyone has those moments in their lives that didn’t turn out the way they thought they might.

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon