Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitask. “I live for tales of displacement and oblivion,” this book’s afterword acknowledges. “The World and All That It Holds” is both ampler and simpler than some of his past experiments. Its story of love, hope and survival traverses the Eurasian land mass and the 20th century, from the trenches of the first world war to the chaos of occupied Shanghai.in Sarajevo, and an epoch ends.
Mr Hemon’s nightmarish battle scenes, offset by the couple’s ecstatic, defiant sensuality, have a visceral impact. Indeed, these “hard and heavy days” of war and desire overshadow the novel’s later acts. After capture by Russians, Pinto and Osman reunite in post-revolutionary Tashkent with baby Rahela in tow, before dodging Red and White warlords along the. Into this lavish tableau of slaughter and adventure, Mr Hemon weaves the yarns of an enigmatic British spy, Major Moser-Ethering.
Osman vanishes on the plains of Turkestan. His kindly, merry spirit remains a constant guide for Pinto as the story leaps across wars and years in a splintered, lyrical chronicle. Pinto and Rahela join the émigré flotsam in the Shanghai of the 1930s, their self-fashioned father-daughter bond—sealed by a private argot of Bosnian, Ladino and German—supplying emotional ballast. Mr Hemon’s scene-painting has flair and colour but can feel secondhand: pre-cut backcloth, not background.
Pinto loses Rahela to a scheming American until, in 1949, the Communist takeover of China spins fortune’s wheel again. A poignant epilogue, set in Jerusalem in 2001, returns to the frontier zone between fact and fiction, memory and history, where Mr Hemon thrives. His novel encompasses thrilling sequences and flatter patches of period melodrama.
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