Book Review: The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

Last year, my spouse played a beautiful song for me in a language I didn’t know. Entranced by it, I went on a search for the translated lyrics, only to discover that I had to buy the physical CD to get the liner notes with the lyrics and their English translation. Along the way, I learned that the album, The World and All That It Holds by Damir Imamović, was based on a novel of the same name by Aleksandar Hemon, and that it was about a cross-cultural gay romance during World War I. I was glad to learn the song was super queer, but the book sounded super depressing, so I filed it in the back of my mind for later.

This year, I decided I wanted to perform to that first beautiful song I heard from the album (I’m a dancer, for any random stranger who happens by this blog and doesn’t already know that), and I felt like reading the book would be a good way to understand the song better and bring a different angle to my performance.

Unfortunately, it turns out that I really, really, disliked the book version of The World and All That It Holds. It’s no Ascendance of a Bookworm, but it exemplifies my least favorite kind of literary fiction. This is some real trauma porn. It’s got Jewish trauma, gay trauma, war trauma, refugee trauma, drug abuse trauma, just trauma for days. Or decades, really, since the book spans more than 30 years and then has a 21st century epilogue.

I am generally not a fan of books that span decades, because I want to really sink into a story and experience a character’s life for a specific period of time, not skim along the surface of a long period of time, only occasionally dipping in deeper, but never as deep as I want to go. I realize this is a really subjective thing. Obviously other people feel differently, or books like this wouldn’t get such critical acclaim.

There’s a huge chunk of praise for Hemon at the end of this book, so I have no doubt that there’s a big audience for this sort of traumatic, depressing, unpleasant work. I suspect those people only read traumatic, depressing, unpleasant works, as the blurb in Libby starts out by calling this book “hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical”. I can tell that some of the stories that Osman tells to buoy the spirits of his fellow soldiers are meant to be funny, and yes, there are some sex scenes but… have these readers ever read a romance novel? Because these are some of the least erotic sex scenes I’ve ever read, along the lines of: “I <blanked> his <blank> until he <blanked>.” So hot!

I don’t hate literary fiction or historical fiction as a whole. I like my various book bingo challenges because they do force me to read out of my usual fantasy/sci-fi/romance bubble, and sometimes I discover a real gem. But books like this remind me of why I usually stay in my bubble. I’m really glad the next book I’m reading after this looks like a contender for the Queer Joy prompt, because the joy in this book was few and far between.

CWs and TWs: Are you ready for this? TONS of violence and death, much of it in the context of trench warfare. Mentions of rape and pedophilia, but no graphic depictions on page. Racism, antisemitism, and homophobia. Child abuse. Drug use and abuse. Illness. Death of a parent. Traumatic child birth. Probably other things I’m forgetting.

Format and Source: I read this as an ebook from Sno-Isle Libraries.

Book Bingo Prompts

Nook & Cranny (Card 2): Bleak Reads. I feel like the review above makes a pretty clear argument for how bleak this book is. To fully explain, I’d have to go into spoilers. But it’s bleak AF. Honestly glad to have this prompt out of the way, though!

SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: Borrowed from a Library. I DNF’ed the first book I chose for this prompt and would have DNF’ed this if not for its relationship to my dance project, so I am declaring this square CURSED. Which is weird, because for someone who gets most of her books from the library, this should have been an easy gimme square.

Book Bingo Progress

Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 13 out of 25 prompts complete. 1 bingo.

Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 12 out of 25 prompts complete. 0 bingos.

SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 3 out of 23 prompts, 0 bingos.