Rafael Pinto is a happy man in his apothecary shop within the Jewish community of Sarajevo on the morning of June 28th, 1914, singing the praises of lavender and laudanum as he takes a little hit of the powder that “helps the world be snug inside God’s garments”. The city is busy welcoming dignitaries. Pinto closes up to follow an object of his affection into the street, thereby witnessing the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the moment “the world exploded”, the moment “that broke the world in two, into the before and the after”.
In the before Pinto’s life was idyllic, filled with poetry, but now, in the after, he’s conscripted into the imperial army and sent to war where “once you had to scrub brains off your hands…the passion for poetry evaporates like a tear in the sun”. The only ray of light and hope is Osman, a Muslim who tells stories that keep the men around him alive. They fall deeply in love in the trenches where “nothing happened all the time and also very slowly”.
Nothing, that is, until Pinto’s world is shattered again by the Russian Brusilov Offensive of 1916. He is sent to the prison camp at Tashkent but this is only the beginning of an odyssey across Asia, through the Taklamakan desert and on to Shanghai to face another onslaught, suffering morphine addiction, starvation and loss along the way.
Hemon’s marvellous novel, epic in scale yet moving in its descriptions of unbearable personal hardship, lives up to its title, managing as it does to contain just about everything from the stories we tell each other to try to make sense of our lives to a God that is “knowable only in the imperfection of his creation” but markedly absent.
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Just as Hemon was stranded in America when war broke out in his native Bosnia, this is a story of displacement in the face of world events where ordinary people are tossed about like dust in the wind but, most powerfully of all, it is a story of love. “The body is strong but the world always ends up crushing it,” but love is stronger still and the everyman character of Pinto – son, father, partner – endures because of it.
