★ 2022-10-26
With death the only escape from seemingly endless wars, a Bosnian refugee perseveres.
As this epic novel leaps from country to country, decade to decade, life to death and back again, little seems to connect for Rafael Pinto. He’s a witness to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which ignites the First World War. It also shatters Rafael’s old life in his home in Sarajevo, a city he fears no longer exists as his conscription into warfare takes him farther away. He is an outsider three times over—he's Jewish, he's homosexual, and he finds some respite from his meaningless life in drugs. He lives from moment to moment, for the next kiss, the bliss of the next high. That is, until he makes the crucial connection of his life, to a handsome Muslim soldier named Osman Karišik, who seems to sense a kindred spirit and woos Rafael without much regard to the protocols of their regiment. He might not give Rafael’s life purpose and meaning, but he does give him a reason to live that day and the next, to follow wherever he leads. Even when Osman dies, his voice remains very much alive within Rafael, with its insistence that now is not the time for him to die. Because he somehow has a daughter, who was Osman’s daughter and now his, who will require his protection. Throughout a narrative spanning decades, from Sarajevo to Shanghai, the bleakness of war and its aftershocks remains relentless, “the despair that overwhelmed him in the middle of the night, the horror of an absent future…which is constantly degrading. It is hard to see what the point of any of it is….We just live because we are afraid to die. We live out of cowardice.” Yet the writing remains powerful, beautiful, and the epilogue provides an origin story that puts everything that has preceded it in fresh light.
Hemon pulls no punches in his most ambitious novel to date.
The World and All That It Holds would be an audacious title for a book by anybody except God–or Aleksandar Hemon. . . the irrepressible voice of The World and All That It Holds glides along a cushion of poignancy buoyed by wry humor. From start to finish, no matter what else he’s up to, Hemon is telling a tale about the resilience of true love.”
—RON CHARLES, The Washington Post
“Love is not the engine of history, but it certainly makes for an indispensable source of auxiliary power in the historical novel… In this novel idyll and ordeal are not stable categories, but slide past each other.”
—ADAM MARS-JONES, The New York Times Book Review
"In the weeks since I finished Aleksandar Hemon’s unlike-any-novel-I’ve-read-before The World and All That It Holds, I have puzzled over how vividly it remains with me — I keep reentering this world, its sensory intensity more palpable than many memories of my own life."
—RACHEL COHEN, Boston Globe
“Hemon’s writing is both gripping and lucid. He creates this work around such meticulous texture that the reader can stand alongside Pinto, and feel the cities as if they were with him… The World And All That It Holds is a book that will resonate with readers because it shows how a life with purpose is one that is constant motion."
—EDWARD BANCHS, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds is one of the finest novels I’ve ever read, and like all great stories, it refuses to be pigeonholed. It’s a road novel, an immigrant tale, a ghost story, a family portrait, a mystery, a historical epic, a war novel, and yes, a love story—it is all that and more, a feat of unfettered literary bravura. In short, a masterpiece.”
—RABIH ALAMEDDINE, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope
"Hemonites rejoice! The master is back and he has forged a remarkable tale of love and war alongside his own 20th Century Silk Road. From Sarajevo to Shanghai, every sentence, every paragraph is a sensuous and often hilarious delight. Not a Hemonite yet? I envy you your very first encounter with one of the world's greatest writers."
—GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Our Country Friends
"The World and All That It Holds is a twisting, turning epic rooted in love in all its forms; an odyssey of statelessness; a haunted museum of history ranging from Sarajevo to Shanghai and Jerusalem; and an apothecary of wit, folklore and unexpectable sentences. This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon’s masterpiece.”
—DAVID MITCHELL, author of Cloud Atlas
"The World and All that It Holds is an explosive novel. Bursting with energy, wits, and insights, it’s an epic meditation on history, philosophy, and human conditions. Aleksandar Hemon once again proves him to be one of our most innovative and invigorating novelists."
—YIYUN LI, author of The Book of Goose
“This book is a refuge. Amid the catastrophe and unimaginable loss, you can still find heartbreaking kindness; you can still hear songs and laughter; still know the tender brush of a lover’s whiskered cheek. Every page folds itself around you, as comforting as an embrace, and in those pages, you will feel Aleksandar Hemon’s heart beating beside yours.”
—LANA WACHOWSKI, filmmaker
“The World And All That It Holds is a masterwork of the epic and the intimate. I lost myself to this tale of Sarajevans drawn into the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and their fight to survive in the war that followed. It is a staggering work of beauty and brutality, a testament to love, family, and the ties that call us home.”
—DOUGLAS STUART, author of Shuggie Bain
"An astoundingly expansive new novel form one of my all-time favorite writers. The World and All That It Holds is at once a heartbreaking love story and a thrilling history of twentieth-century Eurasia. It's an amazing accomplishment of epic history and personal drama."
—JESSE EISENBERG
