My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You
Read by
Jeremy Arthur
Release:
06/11/2019
Runtime:
8h 45m
Quantity:
My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You has two front covers, two title pages, two copyright pages; the halves have been placed back-to-back rather than sequentially. Like Hemon’s fiction, the real-life stories in My Parents are so exquisitely constructed that their scaffolding is invisible. You get the sense that he is trying to understand his parents in a way that his younger self did not… [it] is warm, wry and loving…. This Does Not Belong to You is rawer and stranger, focused more on Hemon than his parents, though the two halves of the book work in tandem. That these two Hemons live side by side in the same volume is a way for him to show how the act of writing allows him to “organize my interiority.” Writing about one exhausting excursion with his inexhaustible father (involving beehives, a color TV, the World Cup, and a tractor), Hemon distills their relationship into a couple of vibrant sentences, impeccably timed: “I just sat there accepting the fact that I was but a loose particle in my father’s hypercharged narrative field. Meanwhile, he was already contentedly slurping his soup.
New York Times Book Review
An intimate portrait of immigration, family, and the heartbreaking (and sometimes hilarious) things that happen along the way from the author Colum McCann calls "the greatest writer of our generation."
In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents' immigration from Bosnia to Canada--of the lives that were upended in the Siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, Hemon portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother's lonely upbringing, his father's fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country, from the rule of Otto von Bismarck to the massacres that shocked the world. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course--his parents, sister, uncles, cousins--and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav communist revolutionary partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, and a few befuddled Canadians.
That would be enough to astound readers and yet Hemon also shares an untampered series of beautifully distilled memories and observations titled This Does Not Belong to You, the perfect complement to a major work from a major writer who is about to become unignorable.
In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents' immigration from Bosnia to Canada--of the lives that were upended in the Siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, Hemon portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother's lonely upbringing, his father's fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country, from the rule of Otto von Bismarck to the massacres that shocked the world. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course--his parents, sister, uncles, cousins--and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav communist revolutionary partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, and a few befuddled Canadians.
That would be enough to astound readers and yet Hemon also shares an untampered series of beautifully distilled memories and observations titled This Does Not Belong to You, the perfect complement to a major work from a major writer who is about to become unignorable.
Release:
2019-06-11
Runtime:
8h 45m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780735239685
Praise