My Heart by Semezdin Mehmedinović
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beautiful, spare, evocative, deeply humane and loving.
It doesn’t matter if it’s “a novel,” as the cover says it is, or a memoir, as it seems to be, or if it’s that murky hybrid some call “autofiction.” The narrator / main character / author is Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinovic, who describes in three linked sections (“Me’med,” “Red Bandanna,” and “Snowflake”) three momentous events in the life of his family. In the first, he suffers a heart attack. The second is a road trip he takes with his thorny, gifted photographer son through Arizona and Death Valley, and the third is his wife Sanja’s stroke, which damages her ability to remember. In all three, Mehmedinovic muses gravely on the sinuous intertwining of memory, exile, home and homelessness, love, family, language, mortality, connections and disconnections with places and other people. It meanders, it wanders, there is no propulsion of plot, but rather repeated themes, and anecdotes retold in slightly different ways or highlighting different details, that tie the stories together. He notices, observes, describes and ponders. Whether or not any part of it is “true” or “really happened” exactly as he says doesn’t even matter. His attentive, precise language – without elaboration or literary decoration – gives it all the truth it needs.
“Snowflake” in particular moved me, in its clear-eyed and acid depiction of the hospital experience (and the contrast between his own experience as a patient and Sanja’s, and his own as her “guardian” and support is dramatic), and in how the love he and his wife share must change and renew in the aftermath of her stroke. “When I get home from work, we have coffee and remember the past. Every day. And I always hope she will have woken up that morning and recalled everything.” This does not happen. Instead, as Sanja observes, “Everyone else knows more about my life than I do. I’m a stranger to myself.”
Thanks to “her Semezdin” and his beautiful words, they are not entirely strangers to us, and perhaps will help us avoid becoming strangers to one another.
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