Available:
Store & Online
Product Info
Publisher: MCD
Author: Aleksandar Hemon
ISBN: 9780374287702
Year: 2024
Format: Paperback
Historical fiction
The World and All That It Holds
by
Aleksandar Hemon
The World and All That It Holds by
Aleksandar Hemon
Reviews
"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"
New York Times Book Review
Summary
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.