I do not know how to describe what I am feeling after finishing this book. It made me joyful, made me very sad, I was left feeling hopeful, feeling that I have lost someone, and made me want to dream all over again. The book begins in Sarajevo. The book transports us to 1914, the assassination that triggered the first world war.
In all of this action there is Rafael Pinto – Sephardic-Jewish, Vienna education pharmacist, who is homosexual, uses opium to free himself, and is bold enough to kiss cavalry officers who come to his shop. The war sends him off all the way across to the Eurasian landmass, and eventually he is in Shanghai, 35 years later. The book is epic – not only in its scope but also when it comes to the human heart. Pinto’s losses are palpable. When his lover Osman, whom he meets during the war, goes missing, we see the melancholy that is unbearable, the kind that can be gone only when you drown yourself in alcohol or other substances. And how it all changes for him one fine day, when he encounters someone.
In all of this there is also comfort in a way that I found extremely surprising and also taken in by the twist. Pinto’s character made me bleed for him. I wanted to hold him and tell him that it will all be okay. He never loses hope – never losing his sensitivity, his poetic self, no matter how hard his world is crumbling around him. Hemon’s prose makes you read in different languages. You are reading English, of which you are aware, but there is also Bosnian and German and Turkish and Spanish that enters these pages – with no explanation (which is a great thing to my mind) – on one hand language helps binding people in the narrative, and on the other hand it excludes.
Hemon’s novel is magnificent – it is about love that is there in so many forms, love that makes you question everything, and how it ends up redeeming you for all that is worth – The World and all That It Holds is a coming-of-age-novel, it is a novel about friendship, about what binds us, about who we are as people, about the repercussions of war, of people and who they are at the core, but above all about love in its most simple and pure form.
