The World and All That It Holds: A Novel

by Aleksandar Hemon

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

One for the philosopher, The World and All That It Holds is Aleksandar Hemon at his finest. Spanning decades and continents, this story contains multitudes, making it perfect for lovers of fiction (especially historical fiction) to pick up. At its core is an examination of love of all kinds, but this book is so much more, exploring history, philosophy, and death in a hilarious and heartbreaking way. A modern classic.

The World and All That It Holds—in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical glory—showcases Aleksandar Hemon’s celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.

As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can’t put in perspective.

And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller; Pinto’s protector and lover.

Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman—with the occasional opiatic interlude—that keeps him going.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374287702
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	33,827
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller, along with several books of short stories—The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles; and the novel The Making of Zombie Wars. He has also written the essay volumes The Book of My Lives and My Parents/This Does Not Belong to You. Among other accolades, he has received a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a Writer in Mid-Career, and the 2020 John Dos Passos Prize. He cowrote the script for The Matrix Resurrections and produces music as Cielo Hemon. He teaches at Princeton University.

Editorial Reviews

10/03/2022

Three-time NBCC finalist Hemon (The Lazarus Project) returns with a potent story of love, war, and displacement in the early 20th century. Rafael Pinto, a Bosnian Jew, returns from schooling in Vienna and takes over his recently deceased father’s apothecary in Sarajevo. After Pinto witnesses Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, he’s drafted into the army and falls in love with Osman Karišik, a fellow soldier, Muslim orphan, and prodigious storyteller. Soon, the two are captured by the Russians and imprisoned in Tashkent. There, Pinto is tormented by disease, starvation, and the random executions of inmates, especially after Osman is pulled from their cell. But as the war ends, Osman frees Pinto, and they’re helped in Tashkent by a Jewish doctor and his daughter, Klara. After a period of relative peace and happiness, the two friends’ lives become deeply entwined with Klara’s family. Then Bolsheviks sweep the country, and Pinto flees across central Asia during the early 1920s, making his way toward China while yearning for Osman and grappling with opium addiction. Hemon easily immerses readers in the characters’ various languages, particularly the Sarajevo “Spanjol” dialect, and brings home via vivid daydreams Pinto’s anguish while separated from Osman. Readers will delight in this sweeping epic. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

The World and All That It Holds would be an audacious title for a book by anybody except God–or Aleksandar Hemon. . . the irrepressible voice of The World and All That It Holds glides along a cushion of poignancy buoyed by wry humor. From start to finish, no matter what else he’s up to, Hemon is telling a tale about the resilience of true love.”
—RON CHARLES, The Washington Post

“Love is not the engine of history, but it certainly makes for an indispensable source of auxiliary power in the historical novel… In this novel idyll and ordeal are not stable categories, but slide past each other.”
—ADAM MARS-JONES, The New York Times Book Review

“Hemon’s writing is both gripping and lucid. He creates this work around such meticulous texture that the reader can stand alongside Pinto, and feel the cities as if they were with him… The World And All That It Holds is a book that will resonate with readers because it shows how a life with purpose is one that is constant motion."
—EDWARD BANCHS, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds is one of the finest novels I’ve ever read, and like all great stories, it refuses to be pigeonholed. It’s a road novel, an immigrant tale, a ghost story, a family portrait, a mystery, a historical epic, a war novel, and yes, a love story—it is all that and more, a feat of unfettered literary bravura. In short, a masterpiece.”
—RABIH ALAMEDDINE, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope

"Hemonites rejoice! The master is back and he has forged a remarkable tale of love and war alongside his own 20th Century Silk Road. From Sarajevo to Shanghai, every sentence, every paragraph is a sensuous and often hilarious delight. Not a Hemonite yet? I envy you your very first encounter with one of the world's greatest writers."
—GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Our Country Friends

"The World and All That It Holds is a twisting, turning epic rooted in love in all its forms; an odyssey of statelessness; a haunted museum of history ranging from Sarajevo to Shanghai and Jerusalem; and an apothecary of wit, folklore and unexpectable sentences. This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon’s masterpiece.”
—DAVID MITCHELL, author of Cloud Atlas

"The World and All that It Holds is an explosive novel. Bursting with energy, wits, and insights, it’s an epic meditation on history, philosophy, and human conditions. Aleksandar Hemon once again proves him to be one of our most innovative and invigorating novelists."
—YIYUN LI, author of The Book of Goose

“This book is a refuge. Amid the catastrophe and unimaginable loss, you can still find heartbreaking kindness; you can still hear songs and laughter; still know the tender brush of a lover’s whiskered cheek. Every page folds itself around you, as comforting as an embrace, and in those pages, you will feel Aleksandar Hemon’s heart beating beside yours.”
—LANA WACHOWSKI, filmmaker

“The World And All That It Holds is a masterwork of the epic and the intimate. I lost myself to this tale of Sarajevans drawn into the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and their fight to survive in the war that followed. It is a staggering work of beauty and brutality, a testament to love, family, and the ties that call us home.”
—DOUGLAS STUART, author of Shuggie Bain

"An astoundingly expansive new novel form one of my all-time favorite writers. The World and All That It Holds is at once a heartbreaking love story and a thrilling history of twentieth-century Eurasia. It's an amazing accomplishment of epic history and personal drama."
—JESSE EISENBERG

From the Publisher

08/01/2022

In 1914 Sarajevo, gentle-souled Rafael Pinto pounds herbs in his pharmacy until war explodes with Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination and he finds himself in the trenches, attracted to and protected by man-of-action Osman. The two desert the trenches, countering spies and Bolsheviks along the way, and in travels far and wide (even to Shanghai) Rafael is sustained by his love for Osman. From National Book Award/National Book Critics Circle finalist Hemon.

Library Journal

★ 2022-10-26
With death the only escape from seemingly endless wars, a Bosnian refugee perseveres.

As this epic novel leaps from country to country, decade to decade, life to death and back again, little seems to connect for Rafael Pinto. He’s a witness to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which ignites the First World War. It also shatters Rafael’s old life in his home in Sarajevo, a city he fears no longer exists as his conscription into warfare takes him farther away. He is an outsider three times over—he's Jewish, he's homosexual, and he finds some respite from his meaningless life in drugs. He lives from moment to moment, for the next kiss, the bliss of the next high. That is, until he makes the crucial connection of his life, to a handsome Muslim soldier named Osman Karišik, who seems to sense a kindred spirit and woos Rafael without much regard to the protocols of their regiment. He might not give Rafael’s life purpose and meaning, but he does give him a reason to live that day and the next, to follow wherever he leads. Even when Osman dies, his voice remains very much alive within Rafael, with its insistence that now is not the time for him to die. Because he somehow has a daughter, who was Osman’s daughter and now his, who will require his protection. Throughout a narrative spanning decades, from Sarajevo to Shanghai, the bleakness of war and its aftershocks remains relentless, “the despair that overwhelmed him in the middle of the night, the horror of an absent future…which is constantly degrading. It is hard to see what the point of any of it is….We just live because we are afraid to die. We live out of cowardice.” Yet the writing remains powerful, beautiful, and the epilogue provides an origin story that puts everything that has preceded it in fresh light.

Hemon pulls no punches in his most ambitious novel to date.

Kirkus Reviews