Elegant, elegiac essays

Srebenica. Sniper Alley. Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. If memories of the Bosnian war are starting to fade, you’d do well to pick up a copy of Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Book of My Lives” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25).

The Bosnian-born writer, who came to America through a cultural exchange program and sought political asylum when the siege of Sarajevo blocked his return, is an elegant and funny writer who, amazingly, didn’t write in English until he moved here in his late 20s, in 1992.

All of the essays in the book, Hemon’s first work of nonfiction, were originally published elsewhere, accounting for its somewhat disjointed feel. But cumulatively, the pieces add up to a singular life — acutely observed.

If there is one weakness, it’s Hemon’s fondness for abstractions, as in, “The funny thing is that the need for collective self-legitimization fits snugly into the neoliberal fantasy of multiculturalism.” The words “exteriority” and “interiority” show up more than once.

But far more passages sparkle with finely observed details of daily life in the waning years of the federal republic of Yugoslavia, turning darker as Hemon anticipates the tribal hatreds that would eventually tear apart his beloved country.

When, in the opening pages, an innocent joke at a children’s birthday party about a fluffy wool sweater from Turkey is misconstrued as a racist insult, you know with dread in your heart what will be coming next.