The Sarajevo-born author on his new historical novel’s multilingual sensibility, turning screenwriter for The Matrix sequel and pretending to be Kevin Keegan
Aleksandar Hemon, 58, was born in Sarajevo and lives in New Jersey. His diverse output includes The Lazarus Project (2008), a novel drawing on the 1908 shooting of a Jewish migrant by Chicago police; the autobiographical essay collection The Book of My Lives (2013), which discusses the death of Hemon’s second child; and the screenplay for The Matrix Resurrections, co-written with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell. His new book, The World and All That It Holds, is a century-spanning, cross-continental polyglot gay romance between two conscripts, one Jewish, one Muslim, who fall in love fighting the first world war in central Europe. Hemon spoke from his office at Princeton University, where he has been teaching creative writing since 2018.
Where did The World and All That It Holds begin?
I signed a contract for the book in 2010 and cleared my schedule that fall to work on it, and then my daughter got ill and died that year. I’ve since written four other books and many other things while working on it on and off because I have this ability – more like a deformation – to work on about seven things at the same time; I react to stress with hypermania and feel a compulsion to make stuff. I like history books about wars and spies and was reading the memoirs of a British spy, Frederick Bailey, who in 1918 was in Tashkent [in Uzbekistan, then under Russian rule]. The Bolsheviks are looking for him when he runs into a Sarajevan guy from the secret police, who says: “Let’s work together. I want to get out of here too, back to Sarajevo.” This guy devises an exit for them by hiring Bailey to hunt for himself; I liked that! My boys, Pinto and Osman, have a different setup, but that’s what started me thinking.
