THIS DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU

ALEKSANDAR HEMON

Picador, 368pp, £14.99

In 1992 Aleksandar Hemon was a 28-year-old Bosnian on a travelling scholarship in America with a Yugoslav passport when war broke out in his home country. His parents caught the last train out of Sarajevo and, speaking little English, began new lives in Canada. Hemon himself remained in America, where he embarked on a successful literary career, publishing novels, stories and essays in his adopted language. These two volumes of memoir – published together in a tête-bêche edition – offer a composite portrait of Tito’s Yugoslavian project. The essay about his parents teams with Partisans, Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians as well as stories about smoking meat and bee-keeping. Now in their 80s, the elder Hemons run an apiary out of their backyard in Ontario – ‘Hemon’s Honey’. The companion volume, This Does Not Belong to You, makes no attempt to deal with the broken history of the author’s birth country.

‘Hemon seems responsible here not to his parents, only to his boyhood self,’ observed Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in the Guardian. There are short vignettes about his earliest memories, his first love, the first time he was beaten up. Anna Aslanyan in the Spectator found some of the vignettes repetitive, and compared the volume unfavourably with an earlier memoir, The Book of My Lives. But William Atkins in the Financial Times took the view that ‘the books of certain authors feel less like discrete artefacts than chapters of a greater book – their life’s work – in which a set of themes, or a world, is revisited again and again, like a dream that expands and deepens night by night’.