Review by Booklist Review
Rafael Pinto has returned to Sarajevo and his Sephardic Jewish family in 1914 after his glory days at college in Vienna. Enamored of other men, poetry, and altered states, he had hoped for a more exciting life than taking over his father's apothecary, but that would have been heaven compared to the hell of being conscripted and sent to the front at the start of WWI. Hemon, always electrifying, returns to fiction after his memoir, My Parents (2019), plunging readers into the horrors and grim absurdities of war in prose molten with caustic irony, furious wit, bitter rage, and transcendent beauty. Dreamy yet resilient Rafael, now a medic, and fellow soldier Osman, who is Muslim, valiant, shrewd, competent, and charming, fall in love and endure fiendish battles and epic deprivation from Galicia to Uzbekistan, Turkestan, and beyond as Hemon orchestrates monstrous slaughters of troops and civilians. As Osman fades away, Rafael rescues a baby girl and pushes on across China's Taklamakan Desert, their arduous journey matched by his endless inner debate about God and life's brutality. Every encounter, battlefield, prison, refugee encampment, and densely crowded Shanghai street under Japanese attack is rendered with exacting sensory detail and haunting spiritual mysteries. Hemon's unflinching, riveting, funny, worldly-wise, and soulful magnum opus wrestles with humanity's shocking depravity and incandescent courage and love.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Three-time NBCC finalist Hemon (The Lazarus Project) returns with a potent story of love, war, and displacement in the early 20th century. Rafael Pinto, a Bosnian Jew, returns from schooling in Vienna and takes over his recently deceased father's apothecary in Sarajevo. After Pinto witnesses Franz Ferdinand's assassination, he's drafted into the army and falls in love with Osman Karišik, a fellow soldier, Muslim orphan, and prodigious storyteller. Soon, the two are captured by the Russians and imprisoned in Tashkent. There, Pinto is tormented by disease, starvation, and the random executions of inmates, especially after Osman is pulled from their cell. But as the war ends, Osman frees Pinto, and they're helped in Tashkent by a Jewish doctor and his daughter, Klara. After a period of relative peace and happiness, the two friends' lives become deeply entwined with Klara's family. Then Bolsheviks sweep the country, and Pinto flees across central Asia during the early 1920s, making his way toward China while yearning for Osman and grappling with opium addiction. Hemon easily immerses readers in the characters' various languages, particularly the Sarajevo "Spanjol" dialect, and brings home via vivid daydreams Pinto's anguish while separated from Osman. Readers will delight in this sweeping epic. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In 1914 Sarajevo, gentle-souled Rafael Pinto pounds herbs in his pharmacy until war explodes with Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination and he finds himself in the trenches, attracted to and protected by man-of-action Osman. The two desert the trenches, countering spies and Bolsheviks along the way, and in travels far and wide (even to Shanghai) Rafael is sustained by his love for Osman. From National Book Award/National Book Critics Circle finalist Hemon.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
