The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. The epic, cross-continental tale of a love so strong it. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon (Large Paperback). Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman-with the occasional opiatic interlude-that keeps him going.ĪJ Woodhams hosts the ' War Books' podcast. The World and All That It Holdsin all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical gloryshowcases Aleksandar Hemon’s celebrated talent at its pinnacle. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. Lets ask Aleksandar Hemon to read from his new novel, 'The World And All It Holds. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto's introspective, poetic soul a charismatic storyteller Pinto's protector and lover. Aleksandar Hemon on his new novel The World And All That It Holds By Scott Simon Published Januat 5:39 AM MST Listen 6:55 SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Rafael Pinto was there in Sarajevo when shots rang out in 1914. The epilogue to The World and All That It Holds recalls a literary festival in Jerusalem in 2001, where a Hemon-figure met an old woman called Rahela. He had a three-minute slot for his fiction, entitled Sasha Hemon Tells. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. In 1987, the writer Aleksandar Hemon was working at a radio station in Sarajevo. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective.Īnd then the world explodes. Today I talked to Aleksandar Hemon about his new novel The World and All That It Holds (MCD, 2023).Īs the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father.