Poured Over: Aleksandar Hemon on The World and All That It Holds

By Miwa Messer / January 24, 2023 at 6:00 am

“At any given time, there’s a choir of ideas and nagging voices in my head — chatter that I had to contend with I guess — in the end it ends up with this model of working and living in which everything is happening simultaneously.”

Aleksandar Hemon, author of National Book Award Finalist The Lazarus Project, has no shortage of accomplishments, including screenwriting credits on Sense8 and The Matrix: Revolutions. He’s back with The World and All That it Holds, an epic love story spanning decades, countries, and political boundaries. Hemon joins us to talk about his multitudinous (and simultaneous) projects, his music career as Cielo Hemon, being a romantic (or not) and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie.

Featured Books:
The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays with occasional Saturdays here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full Transcript For This Episode:

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Aleksandar Hemon: MacArthur Genius Grant, recipient, screenwriter, novelist, essayist, memoirist, short story writer. I mean, that’s how I first encountered you with The Question of Bruno. I think I’m missing something. Dad, son, brother. You, Professor, the music. That’s good. God, I was just talking about that before we started recording. But yes, the music Cielo Hemon. But we will talk about all of this, but I am going to warn listeners to I can’t call you Aleksandar. I have to call you Sasha because I’ve never known you by any other name. And I just Aleksandar, I know, it’s your byline. It’s a great byline. But Sasha, I can’t do it. So hi. So happy to see. So, The World and All That It Holds. I mean, we’re taping this obviously in advance of its publication, but The World and All That It Holds is your new book. It’s your first novel in a while, right?

Since 2015, yeah, right. Since Zombie Wars

I’m going to ask you to set this up. Because I don’t want to give anything away. We’re really going to stick to a spoiler free conversation here. But if I start talking about this book, the way I want to talk about this book, I’m gonna give some stuff, which is not good. So Sasha, will you set this up.

Well, it starts the book starts in 1914 in Sarajevo, Bosnia, my hometown. On the day, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated with his wife, which set off WWI. So the main character is Rafael Pinto, who’s a Sarajevan Bosnian, of the people who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, which, who were welcome to the Ottoman Empire. German speaking in Bosnia was part of it. Any case on June 28 1914, he is just minding his own business at his pharmacy and manages to witness the assassination after that he’s recruited to fight in the Bosnian troops in World War One is in Galicia, today’s Western Ukraine, Ukraine, a big front, where the Austro Hungarian empire was defeated soundly in the so called Brusilov Offensive. And then the prisoners of war were sent to today’s Uzbekistan back then it was Turkistan, the general Russian colonial Province, where he is in a POW camp in the trenches or the army when before he sent to Galicia, and then in Galicia, he falls in love with a fellow soldier Osman, of Muslim background, two of them are now in Tashkent. And they’re also when the Bolshevik revolution starts where the prisoners are released, but they had no way of getting back home. So they tried to get out of the situation. And then, instead of going west, to Bosnia would be West in relation to Tashkent, they go east, for some reason, gentlemen, give up. And then Rafael and a little girl who he deems to be his daughter, they end up in Shanghai. Last few chapters are in Shanghai. And then there’s an epilogue, after that, which is relatively contemporary, the characters in the novel, they go from Sarajevo to Shanghai, you know, over about 35 years. And so that is the setup.

You’ve written a love story, that’s also a war story. That’s a spy story. That’s also a story of displacement and refugees. You do a lot in 300 ish pages. A lot of other writers would, you know, take this as an opportunity to do 600 pages and make a giant, giant thing. But one of the things I’ve always appreciated about you is that you have these sentences, and you just write, grab these little details, and you can do in a sentence, what some other folks might take a little bit longer to do. When did you start working on the world?

Well, I don’t know. But I signed a contract in 2010, with its publisher, and was clearing my schedule, when my young daughter got ill and died. And then I was gone off. And so I was working on the book on and off since then. And in the meantime, I published four other books and wrote scripts and moved to Princeton and a large number of other things. It’s at least 12 years old, probably more, probably, certainly more, but I don’t know I cannot lock it in time, the moment of conception, it was one chapter at a time, the way the book is organized. And so it’s placed in a particular place at the time. So I was moving through those places in those times one at a time. And before each chapter, I would do the research for the place and time. So the first chapter is in Sarajevo in 1914, second chapter is in Galicia, you know, the trenches of Galicia in 1916. So after I wrote the first chapter, then I will do research about trench warfare and Galicia in 1960, and the Bosnian troops, and pretend all that, and then I write that chapter. And then next thing was prisoners of war camps in Central Asia, and I read all that, and so on. So in some ways that it took a long time, but it also it was necessary, I could have done it faster, but I do not suffer from writer’s block, if I have a problem is that I write too much too often. So it’s, I’m fine with that length of time that I spent writing this book.

I don’t know if I consider too much too often a problem when I’m reading you, but okay, I mean, if you want to, if that’s how you’re gonna put it, but I don’t find that a problem. For me. I’m just now thinking though, I mean, if this book, you signed the contract 12 years ago, it sort of changes the way I think about this book already. And thinking about my notes that I have written out, and it’s just, well, it’s throwing me off just a tiny bit, because here I am thinking that this is the absolute evolution of all of the work you’ve been doing. And yes, in the meantime, you did write the zombie novel, and you had two collections of nonfiction. And then we get here and I’m just I’m trying to connect the dots because you never really wanted to write nonfiction you were sort of poked in the direction of that by a lot of different folks.

The thing is, I don’t write or think linearly, which is why I get distracted often. And then I have learned over the years to learn the four or five things simultaneously. Writing, never mind all the other projects, like music or film, or whatever. And so it is, I guess, an advantage of being a dilettante and a scatterbrain that, in fact, that I can do all this. And so you know, people will ask me so this book follows that book, how was that an evolution? Where’s the fact is that was effectively writing all of those books. At the same time.

I’m gonna have to change my approach a tiny bit, because I think I didn’t realize what was happening all at once. I thought, the music and the screenwriting, and the writing of books were the multiple projects. But now the way you describe it, I’m just like, Oh, wait.

My entire life is multiple projects happening simultaneously, synchronously, as it were, which is how I do think that’s fine. But any case, which allowed for me to sort of, not just to evolve the book, but you know, react to things in some convoluted ways. Now, the words I would write things stimulated by things that were happening in my life or around it. But also another thing that I did this with Lazarus Project and Love and Obstacles two books that also was writing at the same time. That’s meant that I didn’t have to put everything in one book.

Yeah, Love and Obstacles is absolute and until The World and All That It Holds came out Love and Obstacles was actually my favorite of your books. And I’m very fond of Question of Bruno. But I thought Bruno, and Nowhere Manalso sort of had that connection because of Jozef Pronek.

Right? Well, yeah. And first book, The Question of Bruno, there the longest story features Pronek and the second book is all about Jozef Pronek.

But were you working on those at the same time, too?

No, I don’t think so. But I was, I mean, working depends how you define working, I wasn’t typing text for two books. At the same time, as I was with these four books that I just mentioned, a five, some point, but rather, I was thinking about things, you know, you will be finishing one story, there’s something in the back of your brain sort of nagging and, you know, growing itself, and developing and growing and all that, I don’t know how to do it, I always keep it as a possibility that I will not write another book, but probably will, and so that there are there are books that I have been, you know, gestating in my head for quite a while now. And so then someone will ask me some years now, you know, how long have you been working on it? And I don’t know. Because what was a half assed idea, you know, generated while I was walking with a dog, and I just put it aside and slowly becomes something that does not go away. And then, and then you write a little bit about it and look into it, read a book or anything, I don’t, I don’t, I want to produce music like this. I want to watch the World Cup, but then the thing keeps growing. And so there is this whole production model in which you sort of have the idea you sort of sit down and write a certain amount of pages over a certain amount of time and you crank it out, you turn it in, you tour, and then you start a new one. I guess that’s how musicians do albums, but that’s not how I do it. At any given time. There’s a choir of ideas, and nagging voices in my head to chatter that I had to contend with and I guess in the end, it ends up with this model of working Live in which in which anything is happening simultaneously?. Yeah, but I get up in the morning when I wake up. I’m like a spring, I do not linger in bed. Unless I’m sick. I cannot wait to get up and do stuff because I’m always behind.

Okay, but wait, you’re teaching full time. Right? You’re also doing the screenwriting on the side, I guess. I mean, do we call that on the side?

Well, I mean, it’s not on the side, when I’m in the project. And so it’s not on the side that people who I work with and for they expect me to be committed and present. It’s not a hobby. I don’t do hobbies. Really. Everything I do I do as though it’s the only job I’m doing.

Which brings me to the music, Cielo Hemon. Because I was listening to you. There was a lot happening as I was prepping for this, but the music, how do we fit the music in to what you’re doing? And how do we describe it. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of ambient dance music, it’s electronica.

It’s electronica as well, I happen to be writing a book about this whole musical project because it started in the pandemic, where I had this intense urge to make stuff to begin with. And then at some point to make music, which started with just my playing the guitar, within a week of the pandemic, not being declared, but within a week of Princeton University dismissing us, I bought an electric guitar and an amp and some pedals. Because I thought it would last for a long time, and I wouldn’t go nuts. And also I can return to playing the guitar. I had played in a band back in the day, but occasionally played Beatles songs for my kids, and started, you know, tormenting the guitar in the bedroom. And I thought, now I can record some of this torment. I started figuring out how to record and then, you know, little by little, I learned to use Logic that music production software, the best thing about it is that I found people to work with. So I started collaborating with a friend of mine, one of my oldest friends I’ve known since first grade, who lives in California, is a phenomenal guitar player, we used to have a band together and talked and thought about the whole time, and we had we had been in touch over the years. But you know, just checking in. And once I contacted him, and you know, said, Yeah, I’m doing this come along. And he was now it’s the friendship was dormant as they were, it’s fully blooming. And we talk and discuss and plan music stuff and expand, and it’s very exciting. But I did they, I mean, I hope that music, it gets very proper makes a lot of money. But I’m only rewarded because I started connecting with people. Then we connected- my friend guitar player, and I with a guy who used to play in a band that once opened for us when we were very young and then he mixes the stuff. And then we then I started producing videos and recruiting various Bosnian visual artists, some of them are new, some of them I became friends with, because I’ve recruited and suddenly this whole operation is growing. And it all comes out of this lead, that I think all arts fulfills, or at least can sell, is of connecting people over time, then space. And in the excitement of making things together is not that easily available in literature and writing, I spent 12 years, you know, with four books in my head. And there’s the thing that depends entirely on regular communication, exchange of ideas and someone else’s knowledge of things that I don’t know well, and it’s become this collective endeavor. In that sense. It’s very similar to screenwriting, because I’ve written solo scripts that have not been produced. But the best screenwriting experiences I’ve had were with other people, the same model, except we’re not in the room is in the music and all these people I like together.

That visual component to to your music brings me back to the world. There are photographs in this book the way there are in Lazarus Project or even early on in Bruno where their photos and whatnot. And because I do sort of think of that as something that you like to do is drop in that visual even though you trust your readers to a certain extent, the idea of you dropping in visuals, and I was a little surprised to have them here. I just I wasn’t expecting that at all.

Well, they’re not that many. They’re only two pictures of two men.

I know. I know. But that sort of reliance on a visual when really, you’re a words guy. Now you’re a music guy too. But you’re a words guy. And I just I want to talk about that. And that connect, is that a way for you to bring more people in

I like looking for forms, new forms for my old ideas as they were right. I don’t think I don’t necessarily think that my books extremely original, but I do think this is how I teach writing, when I teach is that the form for the book I want to write exists before I read the book. So the very process of writing is a search for form. And so in that sense, it’s very difficult because I don’t know what I’m doing until I’m done. But also, it gives a great feeling of discovery, and flexibility. Let’s see what happens if I do this. And I did that in the Question of Bruno, and a number of other books. When I wrote The Lazarus Project, the very idea started with a picture of Lazarus dead in a chair being shown by a white policeman. And I thought, I need that I need to write about this. But with this book, I just came across the pictures of these two men, and I felt I recognized quite, I mean, my characters are not based on any real personalities. But there was something about them when I saw the pictures, I thought, those are the men. And I will not tell you where the pictures are. So I had to be there, not obvious. And the other thing is you were talking about maps, I really talked to my editor, Sean and the designer, he and we work with very often. And so I said, I want maps. And of the world, I want some maps, but not simply representational maps, but maps as part of the makeup of this world. Because they across great distances over time, I wanted the reader to have a sense when they read the book, they in the world, and the world that might or might not exist still. But it’s not they’re not you know, in suburban Chicago, or France, or whatever they in the world. And so I realized only after actually I’d written the book. So it starts in 1914, ends in 1945, at no point are they in any kind of situation, or territorial organization, if you will call a state or functioning state of any kind, they move through history that is in countries and empires that are coming apart. And so it presents them with a different experience of identity in being in the world and being in a in a country or place.

Statelessness, I mean, you can sit and sit with statelessness in two ways. I mean, either you’re Pinto, who’s always, he’s clear that he’s from Sarajevo, and Sarajevo is home. And that’s the core of him. But in order to get back, he’s got to take this rather circuitous route. And so this statelessness is not necessarily something that impacts him until it does, you know, it’s either there or it’s not it isn’t one of these sort of things that he walks around thinking about, like he’s not looking for his passport, until he actually needs papers.

Well, he never quite gets the passport. I don’t get the reason they went. But a lot of people ended up in Shanghai in the ‘30s because you didn’t need a passport to get to Shanghai. But you need a passport to get out. There was a different proposition. And so getting out was the problem. I mean, statelessness was a feature of history at that point in the spring of 1914 and let it be lesson to us today, the spring 1914 the world, much of the world, was part of four major empires, maybe five if you count German Imperial ambition as sustainable, which turned out it wasn’t like let’s say for right and not only were the empires that govern much of the world’s territory, but also they had lasted for centuries, and was rooted in the divine right of kings to rule right an entirely different social organization, right? Not just territorial organizations, social organization with the Emperor at the top of the queen or whatever, five years later, 3 of them were irreversibly gone. The fourth one, the British Empire, is ending before us these days, as with Boris Johnson to last and so clowns have finally won the solution of his empires historically and you know, politically resulted in all these little nation states that would be the conquered by the Soviet Union or the Nazis at some point was entirely different type of message which, by when Pinto both Osman and Pinto at the beginning of the book are the subjects of the Austro Hungarian emperor, Franz Joseph use it so they had no status that they have no state in which their identities were confirmed by the organization of the state. So they, when they leave that they are as free and as and cared for as anyone in the world. And there’s this. I mean, I didn’t start with this demand on my characters to be stateless. I wanted my characters to live in that period. And then that period resulted in a lot of stateless people, The 20^th century was the century of statelessness only toward the end, there was some kind of stabilization, or not toward the end, at the mid-century of some stabilization in Europe, but not anywhere else.

But displacement has always been a part of your work, whether it’s stories, or the longer novels, I mean, certainly starting with your own story, you end up in Chicago in 92, the Bosnian war starts to happen, and you can’t go home. English is in fact, your second language. And I don’t know if every listener would know that, given how you write and how you speak. I

Well, the listener might.

Alright, yeah, there’s a little bit of an accent, but you know, so I’m first gen on one side and old gen on the other side, and I don’t, I don’t know, accents are just, I don’t know, if I take them for granted, or they’re just part of the universe, whatever. I don’t think about that. You’ve been compared to Nabokov, though you’ve been compared to Joseph Conrad, you actually make jokes about Joseph Conrad in Bruno, in the Pronek story, which still makes me laugh, because you’re one of the few people I know who can joke about Conrad and get away with it, because it works. But here’s the thing. I mean, do we ever truly find home? I mean, aren’t we all displaced? In a way? I mean, we’ve got a million different people claiming to be American and saying other people can’t be American. And then I’m just using this as the example because you and I are both Americans. But at the same time, I leave the country and there are places where I’m very comfortable. And then there are other places where I’m like, Yeah, I could go home. Now, this might be great. I mean,

yeah, there’s a difference between feeling displaced and actually being displaced. And so your home space, there has psychological consequences, but also has very concrete, legal and then political consequences. So people who are, you know, the migrants who are drowning in the Mediterranean to them, it’s not a metaphysical question, or philosophical question or identity. They’re displaced, because they’re floating on a boat, make it and when they get across, if they’re going across to France, or the UK or whatever, they will still be displaced, because there’ll be people hunting them, to return them to the place of no place where they came from. They’re going to go and the Mexican border in United States, right? They’re not. I mean, I know what you’re saying. And there’s this sort of disorientation is an experience at this time in this country. But we don’t have the logistical problems of survival, as those people do, which, you know, could result in any number of stories or genres are stories that people would be telling to each other before they even read it. If they ever read it, they have access to what I have. Now, as an American of 30 years, I can simply sit down and write a book and someone will publish. So but what you bring up is interesting that the notion of home, where is it? Is it a concept? Or is it a place? It’s a concept? Is it portable? That is can you take it from here to Shanghai and be at home? Or if it’s a place could you only feel at home in one place? Now, you know, the whole notion of nostalgia comes from the Greek word “nostos”. Which means returning home, the harder it is to return home, the greater nostalgia is. So it’s a contingent upon our concept of home but also a place to which we can return as they were. And so what interests me, because it’s partly my experience, but also because it’s not that people who are migrating had no voices, they just busy migrating, right? They settle they might like I did, and many other people in American literature, at least who have come from elsewhere. Once they settle, then they’ll have voices, some of them. But there’s a whole population, the world they’re too busy just staying alive. And one day they’ll perhaps tell those stories. And so I’ve been thinking about this, as you correctly pointed out from the very beginning, that displacement is the condition of my life, even if I’m in Princeton, and I’m doing very well for the sense and so there is a place that is home in the United States because my family and kids are there a place that is home and Sarajevo well, but conceptually there is nostos, there’s a desire this that cannot be fulfilled to return to this conceptual original home, where things all came. Although might not have ever existed really. But where do you go with things where Okay, and one of the things I wanted to give to Pinto is this is remembrance, partly of Sarajevo, but also his mother’s kitchen for his parents house or the mornings, in beds. So that it’s it is very specific, right? Stay specific. So I do long for a conceptual home. But I do have specific places that could fulfill that need to some extent. But there are people who do not have it conceptually or practically or actually,

nostalgia is also something we can manipulate. It’s easily manipulated. In some cases, Pinto and the rest of the characters, they are that sense of home and that desire to get home that does get manipulated, they are in dangerous situations as a result. And I do want to bring in, there’s a British major who is a wonderful piece of comic relief. But I love this idea. And certainly, you know, it’s something that a lot of writers recently have toyed with I mean, Lauren Wilkerson has toyed with this in American Spy, Viet Thanh Nguyen certainly with The Committed and The Sympathizer, but this idea of spy story is metaphor, bad behavior that isn’t political. I mean, can we just talk about why major had to be part of the story? I mean, he really had to be part of the story and he is a good character and does some wild things.

Well, I’ve always loved spies and in my first book, Questions of Bruno and, and the second book, and in some ways, later books, at least in the Zombies Wars, but it really the idea for the book started because I was reading I read history books randomly. But a memoir by Colonel Frederick Bailey is a British spy in the 20s and Major Moser-Ethering, the character you referred to is kind of based on him and I changed a lot of things Frederick Mad Hatter Bailey, is quite a fascinating character. But in his memoir, Mission in Tashkent it’s called is mentioned about guy in Tashkent, who worked for the Cheka, that Bolshevik Secret Service, who was from Sarajevo, Colonel Bailey was very good at spying. So they couldn’t mention, at some point the Sarajevan spotted him and said, I know who you are, you’re a spy. But I also do not really care about any of this, I want to go back to Sarajevo so let’s work together. And then the Sarajevan he hired Bailey, who was under, you know, pretending to be Romanian, and something to work for the Cheka. And while they were looking for it, so he would go to the office to look for it. And then the same I had here that how to get out of Tashkent, because down the road was Bukhara which was ruled by an emir, very brutally, was not controlled by the Bolsheviks. And so he spread the rumors the Sarajevan and Bailey, they spread the rumors that Bailey was in Bukhara, and then the Sarajevan, volunteered to go to Bukhara and kill Bailey. And then he decided, they said, great idea go and he took Bailey with him, right under false pretense that they were going to kill the guy. And this is how they escaped Tashkent. And I thought, I love this, this is right up my alley. And this the whole and I know how many years ago I read that book, I mean, 15, please, the whole thing started growing from this, this character. And he vanishes from the book and from history, I could not check on that once they get out of Tashkent. This guy who’s doesn’t care about any of this, you know, revolutions and the great game, the competition between the Russian and British Empire is all he wants is to get home. And he’s very good. I would think he made it home. However, in the history, they went to Persia escaped all of this and barely escaped, with a save and escape to Persia, those that then called Project days around with my people, they go east further east.

Yeah, I liked that running east. It’s been so long since Shanghai a sort of made an appearance and it was such a weird place. Anyway, the idea that this Chinese city was run by the Brits, and the Americans and the French, and there were all of these white Russians running around. It was such a bizarre place and so have a moment and have a tie. It fits perfectly.

You didn’t need a passport to be there. There was a large number of refugees, including the white Russians after the revolution. And not just in Shanghai than in the northern city of Harbin is still there, just predominantly Russia and then in World War Two, the Holocaust, began because it didn’t need a passport. There was a relatively low large number of Jews and Jews went up there. And the Japanese while they put them in a ghetto, they did not exterminate them. And the Nazis kept sending their officers to talk them into extermination. But for some reason, it’s a different story. They did not do it. So there was this whole, it was this transient population, in some ways, but also people who were perpetually stuck in Shanghai, who would live there because they couldn’t go anywhere else. And so in some ways, it’s a refugee city par excellence. Even the people, Chinese people in Shanghai, were effectively depending what side of the river they were the Chinese part or the English part, the International Settlement, there were effectively refugees in their own city. And so it was the crime, the prostitution the wealth, and incredibly wealthy people, some of the wealthiest people in the world live in Shanghai. At the time, you know, that Hollywood stars would go to hotels, the hotel in Shanghai in the 30s, the Cathar hotel was the one among the first in the world that had air condition. So you know, Hollywood stars would go there and just to sit in a hotel, take pictures in exotic place. Opium was everywhere, great for storytelling. It’s not a good place to raise kids, though.

You know, again, that sense of belonging, I mean, the fact that Pinto is always moving forward, but he’s moving forward to something that is in his past. I mean, Sarajevo really for him, he’s been gone for almost 40 years, right?

He leaves in 1914. And the book ends in 1949. So instead of moving forward, he’s moving further, if you wish, or farther, and so farther away from Sarajevo while trying to get back there. And it’s, you know, it’s it is not unrelated to what we were talking about, you know, home in ways that conceptual, the more conceptual home is, the harder it is to return to, if you wish, it’s relatively easy to return to a place but if your home is conceptualized as this thing in the past that could never be returned to, then you can just keep going and it’s harder and harder.

Yeah, I will say you have created a heartbreaker of a book, without a doubt. But you also have a buddy who’s written not quite a sound track, per se, but it’s coming out a little later in the spring. It’s an album coming out in Smithsonian Folkways, and you sent me a preview of it and it’s amazing. It’s I cannot wait for this to come out. But will you talk about that a little bit because I do I love the idea that part of this becomes music part of this becomes music that draws on Bosnian tradition, and really sounds amazingly fresh and alive and smart and interesting. And I don’t dance so I can’t say you can dance to it, but it’s a really great and I just want to make sure we don’t lose sight of that in this conversation.

Osman and Pinto, the lovers, they sing to each other and Pinto sings Sephardic songs. They were carried over from Spain, and which I love and there’s a great album, there was a great singer Flory Jagoda left Sarajevo in 1947 a Jewish Sephardic woman survived the Holocaust and ended up in Baltimore. And then later in her life, she was talked to recording an album with songs that her grandmother sent to her from Sarajevo. I love songs he recorded a two or three almost died last year, I think, the age of 95 or something. But these traditional Sephardic songs, but also specifically say even songs, I wanted Pinto to sing that. Osman sings traditional Bosnian songs that come from Islamic tradition, the kind of business called Sevdah. So I have a very good friend Damir Imamovic of a who is one of the great Bosnian Sevdah singers, he’s also comes from a dynasty of singers. His grandfather was a legendary singer, his father was also a singer. And I contacted him as writing the book sometime early in the pandemic and said, how about you record an album that feature some of the songs and that I already used? And then we started working on that. And then he discovered some songs that are then integrated into book after the fact is that work, and then he wrote some songs that pertain to the book. So there’s a song called Osman is about Osman’s love for awesome, it’s fantastic. And so I talked him into this and he loved the idea. He’s an icon of the LGBT+ population in Sarajevo and Bosnia because he’s not in the closet, and he can formulate his position in that context. In a way that is encouraging to people, all of his other albums are fantastic. And the Smithsonian folkways, they have wanted to work with him for a while, and he pitched this thing to them. And they, you know, embraced it instantly. So the album is recorded, it’s in master that everything has its place. It’s just this lack of release that we know in publishing.

Yeah, exactly. Well, we’ll get details, and we’ll drop them in the show notes and all of that, but I did want us to have a chance to talk about it, because like I said, my head kind of exploded a little bit. And to sit with that, in contrast with the music that you’re making is Cielo Hemon was a lot. All good, but it was a lot. And I sort of feel like all of that comes rushing through the world. Because I mean, as much as you and I have been talking about displacement, and spy stories and war stories, and this, you know, constant movement somewhere. Ultimately, you’ve written a love story. And I am burying that lead intentionally because I mean, once you’re in the book, everything else is just a piece of that. Yeah. And I really want people to be able to understand sort of where you’re seated with all of this just because I know your body of work. I mean, I have read everything. I think I may have even read something about soccer. Basketball’s my game, but I read you on soccer. I’m sure there’s some, you know, some one off pieces that I’ve read.

But I’m telling you, I’m writing too much.

You know, I don’t think you’re writing too much. But the soccer stuff is just not necessarily for me. I’m just tossing out there to the world, yeah, you do a lot. But this new novel sits so firmly in the work that you’ve been doing. But you know, this idea that love makes us who we are, or love holds us close to home or love gets us through to the next piece. That’s always there as much as you’re talking about the other stuff. I mean, Sasha, I think you’re kind of a romantic.

I guess I should own up to it. In this instance, in the original in the proposal that I was mentioning, that I wrote to sell the book to my British publisher, they were friends. And I didn’t know when and how did I realize that they should be lovers. And I can kind of remember the reasoning behind that. I think most likely, it just became self evident to me at some point, because it would make everything more interesting. And also it would, it would push me toward the romantic position, it would make me love them more. Because to me, the crucial point in writing any book on characters is when I started loving my characters, and when they’re not simply created by me, but at least I have a kind of delusion that they have agency and sovereignty. And then the best part of writing processes, I can’t wait to get up in the morning to be with them. And along, and then my heart gets broken too, sometimes, at some point early, but I can’t remember when love became the crux of it all. And I was not very romantic. I think my initial interest was negative more than sort of propaganda for love.

Sasha, I called you a romantic? I didn’t tell you, you were a propagandist. Yeah, we know that. But that’s not what I’m saying you were doing!

I’m not saying you were saying that. What I’m saying is that the difference was not negative. They love each other. But it also once I started reading it, I love them more for their love. If that makes sense.

Yeah, it does. It feels much truer to who they both are as characters. And I was certainly invested in a different way. I mean, it’s one thing to have friends sort of, you know, galivanting through and doing whatever they need to do. And then it would have been much more of a buddy story. And because it’s you there would have been moments of comedy, and I’m not sure I would have been as invested in the story without having the stakes be as high as they were. And they just they felt so impossible in parts. And I was like, huh, huh. And there are a couple of things you do that you and I are not going to talk about in this conversation. But at some point we will that are really clever and smart and unexpected. And I did have moments where I was like, Oh, I can still be surprised. I can still be surprised in a story like this. And it was really it was charming, and it was smart. And it was exciting. And I was really mad when the book was over. I was so mad when I got to the end of the book. There are two sort of endings to this book. There’s the actual ending of the primary story and then you put on in this epilogue, and I was mad when the first piece ended, and I was mad when the epilogue ended. I was just so mad to be taken out of this world. Before I let you go, can we just quickly talk about the editing of a book like this, though, because you said, you were writing and researching, writing and researching, writing and researching as we moved through the story, but, you know, again, there is some collaboration when you’re publishing books. I mean, you do hand the book off eventually here, editor, you do eventually hand it off to the team that puts it out in the world, and what have you, but at the same time, are you editing as you go? Are you just doing a massive edit before you hand it over to people who aren’t you?

Well, I mean, people have different methodologies. I’ve have had the same editor, American editor, Sean McDonald. But what he does, it’s all gold, then. So whatever he says, I take into account and very seriously and often act, upon his suggestions, and adamant sound arrogant. I also know what I’m doing. And I know when it’s done, and I know what I want. And and I figure out over time, how to accomplish that. So I love working with Shawn because I can formulate to him what think why things are as they are. Which also means that in his few words, he can also formulate to me why he thinks something else should be a better idea. And so there was never in my life, or 20 years of writing and working with Sean, there was never a major rewrite, sometimes, I wanted to go do some sort of structural changes, shifting the order of chapters or stories, I can’t remember now, but nothing dramatic, dramatic or even stressful. Part of this collaborative process is, the editor, which means the first reader really and the most attentive reader of all the readers was going to read the book. And so working with an editor I never think, certainly not with Sean, there’s some kind of violation of my concept of genius. If someone says, Well, no, what about this? And that, in fact, pointing at things that need addressing is that you know, the stamp that they’re reading the seriously, they want things to, to be in full force.

Hey, what’s next? Are you working on a screenplay now? Or are you working on four books at once? What’s going on?

I’m working on my music. But also, there are other writing projects, including a book that I’m writing about making music, and that I owe a book or two, a one book, I have contract that I have to finish these other ideas. But part of the process of getting to the next book is considering retirement. No, I mean, it’s part of the process, whatever happens, yeah, do I want to go through all this, again, 12 years, a year and a half of preparation, you know, whereas I can do all these other things that I hadn’t done before. And so it’s always been part of my process that I go through talking myself out of writing, the idea that I have, right, and when I can’t talk myself out of it anymore, then I start like, no one’s waiting for the next book to draw. If we start reading all of us right now, we’re good for at least 100 years with books published. And so no one’s going to notice right away, where’s Hemon’s last book, or is Hemon’s next book, no one’s going to ask me- the people in the business. But outside of it, that wound would just close. And so it has to be it has to feel necessary. You know, and so this is why I talk myself out of it until I can’t at which point it feels necessary. And inescapable. And then, I write,

Yeah, the bookseller over here is like, okay, but Sasha no, just keep writing. I get it, I get it. We will always have writers, but you know, and I got to go back and spend a lot of time with your really early books, as I was prepping for this because I was looking for the through line between the early stuff when I first met you a million years ago, because of Sean and Bruno and then Jozef Pronek, and then Lazarus Man, and then we get to this book. And yeah, I mean, Love and Obstacles, love that collection. And the zombie novel is great. But this book feels like something you’ve been working to for a really long time. And then you tell me you signed the contract in 2010. And if anyone has read The Aquarium, we know what happened in 2010, it’s included in the Book of My Lives, and I cannot recommend it enough. I will tell you, I went back to it just as we were sitting down to tape and I had to stop reading because I know how the story ends. I know what happens. And I couldn’t go there right before sitting down with you. So, and again, I know I sound like I’m talking in circles. But really, if you haven’t read The Aquarium, just go read that piece and it will explain why I had a moment at the top of the show where I was like, Huh, okay, now I need to redo my approach to the new novel. But Sasha, I always love talking to you. I really do. I mean, we get to go in really weird directions and talk about stuff that other people are probably going, why are they talking about this, but really, it all comes down to the love. It really just comes down to love. And if you don’t have the love, then why are we here?

I am a romantic, but also it’s born and experienced because you can lose property and countries and this and that, what you miss and what you need and what sustains you is , other people and other people you love not, you know, not your bosses or underlings it’s people you love that keep you in the world. And it’s if they do not want to be in the world. They feel unloved. And so I think it’s the failure of the world in some ways, but that’s what sustains us- I don’t care if it sounds romantic. I’m not sappy. But I think one of the things about this book is that I learned things about myself and others are reading, which is I do doing what I do. I don’t want to know things and then present them to others and lecture them. I want to find ways to discover things about the world, people and myself in doing it. And then residues that are all over the book. And another thing about this book, thank you for not mentioning it. It is the one that is not autobiographical.

Yeah, no. I know. But I thought you were tired of talking about the autobiography. I’m just focusing on the art that came out of it.

I said, I’m glad you didn’t mention it. In some ways I had to graduate to this level, because I’m talking about myself, I suppose. But also, I could. There’s a continuity.

Yeah, completely, without a doubt.

Autobiographical and entirely non-autobiographical.

Which is why I’m curious to see what comes next. Because I think you’ve I think you’ve unlocked the door here and I suspect something new is coming. And I love the idea that you’re always looking for the form of the thing as you’re writing. And I think that’s really important. I think the idea that the form will let you know what it needs to be is for an entirely other conversation. And I should also mention, too, I should have mentioned the top of the show, you’re also a poet, but that’s a whole other conversation.

You don’t have enough time to list all the things that I did.

I know, but it’s really cool. It’s really cool. And your students are really lucky. And there’s a reason you got that MacArthur Genius Grant. So at this point, I’m going to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sasha.

Thank you, Ciao.