The first two stories in Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection, are both about adolescence: that awkward period in human development that reveals its full freakishness best when you attempt to depart from it.
So let’s have some laughs at the expense our fictional narrator, who is on a train bound for a town called Murska Sobota, entrusted with a family mission to buy a huge freezer chest. If our hero wasn’t so young he’d remind me of Don Quixote. But our hero’s quest is no less improbable. He is trying to grow up.
He’s in a train compartment with a secret, he’s holding a huge amount of cash to buy the freezer. Two thugs enter talking about rape and manslaughter and their colleague with the incredible moniker, “Fahro the Beast”. Fahro had his nose bitten off. The guys don’t say how this happened but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did it. Our boy, who they refer to as “the child” pretends he is still asleep and I don’t blame him. When he “wakes” the first thing the cons want to know is if he fucks. Answer: “a little.” Let’s move on.
At Zagreb, our narrator switches to a bus for the final leg to MS and meets some other offbeat characters. I noticed the elegant dodge that Tobias Wolff also used in Firelight…having his child narrator tell this story as a grown up so that you weren’t shaken out of your fictional suspension of disbelief by having a kid appear to have the sophistication of a mature Aleksandar Hemon.
At the hotel, our truly hapless hero has more crazy experiences connected to his too direct means of trying to solve one of his problems. Too direct and misplaced…and too pharmaceutical…like she’s married and happily sharing a room with her husband You can piss off hotel management to no end this way also but, hell, it’s his first big trip.
But all that’s just like playing dodge ball with your hormones. The comedy is a screen for something special. It turns out that growing up isn’t such an insane project after all. It’s involves being yourself and seeing the world as your parents don’t see it….a quest for a stockpile of frozen food shouldn’t be the primary goal in life. A stockpile of short stories, like Love and Obstacles, will last much longer.
-DH
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