The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on January 24, 2023

“If there were no righteous humans, Padri used to say, the blessings of God would become completely hidden and Creation would cease to exist.” Rafael Pinto knows that righteous humans exist because he can still see stars at night. His father also told Pinto that “Heaven is a revolving wheel” and that everything around you will change if you sit still, while if you keep moving, you will never be the same. Both adages inform Pinto’s life.

The World and All That It Holds is the story of a life in motion, a life that is neither righteous nor evil. “Each and every one of us has a thousand demons at his left, and ten thousand demons at his right. What are we to do with all those demons?” The question is at the center of Pinto’s existence.

Pinto is a Bosnian who studied medicine in Vienna. Early in the novel, Pinto is in Sarajevo, where he sees the shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The shot tears Pinto away from his fantasies of the handsome cavalry officer from whom, minutes earlier, he stole a kiss in the back room of his family’s apothecary. Within weeks, Pinto and tens of thousands of other Bosnians are conscripted into the Imperial Army and deployed to Serbia. Pinto’s abbreviated medical training turns him into a battlefield doctor who watches most of his patients die.

Two years later, Pinto’s company is stuck in Galicia and Pinto is sleeping with Osman, who defends him from the soldiers “who practice the age-old custom of bullying a Jew.” They survive slaughter in Galicia before, as prisoners, they ride a train to Tashkent.

After they gain their freedom, Pinto works in a hospital and Osman joins the Cheka so he will have time to devise a plan to return to Sarajevo. They have a tacit understanding that Pinto will not ask Osman what he does when he is serving the Bolsheviks. Pinto would rather not know. Osman would rather that Pinto not know the truth about a mysterious man who is hiding in the home they share. Pinto later encounters the mystery man (now known as Moser) in Makhram and again in Shanghai. Moser will eventually write about those meetings in his memoirs.

Pinto spends the rest of the novel hoping to make his way back to Sarajevo, a seemingly foolish hope since he is stateless and has no passport. Bosnia has become Yugoslavia, a country that would not recognize his existence even if he could afford travel papers. With no other options, Pinto follows the flow of refugees. He travels to Xinjiang where Cossack marauders kill everyone in sight. He joins a caravan to travel through the Siberian desert. He spends a good part of his life in Shanghai, sometimes living on a rooftop with refugees from the Chinese part of the city when it is shelled by Japan.

The World and All That It Holds reads like a literary adventure novel, except that the adventurer is poor and powerless. He has not chosen his life and is far from the captain of his own fate. On many occasions, Pinto thinks he would welcome death. “Death is always growing inside you, like a nail growing on your soul.” Yet in his worst moments, he is told by a dead man that his time has not yet come, that he has a duty to make life better for someone who is still alive.

Pinto’s life is one of struggle. He struggles to survive. “The meaning of life is not to die.” Yet survival makes Pinto a witness to horror. He struggles with the brutality of war, with condemnation of his sexual and religious identities, with an addiction to morphine and opium. He struggles with loss and betrayal. He struggles to keep a child alive after delivering her for a mother who dies in childbirth (the first time he has seen a vagina since he dissected a cadaver during his medical training). He contemplates how the Lord creates new worlds while destroying old ones, how humans cannot fathom God’s rules.

Yet this is also a story of love. Osman is always in Pinto’s life, even when he might only a ghost or a voice in his head. Pinto loves a married Chinese man in Shanghai, unless it is the man’s opium he loves. He loves Rahela, the little girl he raises like a daughter until, against his wishes, she finds a different kind of love elsewhere. Only later does Rahela realize that it is Pinto who has always loved her, that she wasted her life by not loving Pinto enough. You’ll need to read the novel to find out whether that realization comes too late.

And it is a story of evil. Of wars that decimate the innocent. Of ethnic hatred. Of men like the American who seduces Rahela, “evil so nicely smelling, so sunny, with his combed hair and clipped nails and cleanly shaven, always taking whatever he wants from other people, ransacking their lives, as if everything and everyone belonged to him, as if everyone else was just passing through the world given to him at birth.”

Prose like the sentence quoted above permeates the novel — strong prose that propels the novel like a freight train gaining speed, the kind of prose that is needed to tell a powerful story. I could have done without the epilog (a jump to the present that purports to explain how the story came to be written), but the story that precedes it is an amazing blend of humor, tragedy, and adventure. The novel speaks a purposeful truth and, without being the least bit sentimental, it put a lump in my throat.

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