Review of The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon

Reader beware: this is not your normal short story collection. There's not one traditional "short story" with a beginning, a middle, and an end. They're a mix of slice-of-life and vignette. This can work to great effect in the hands of, say, Victoria Lancelotta in Here in This World. In Hemon's collection, the writing is interesting and curious, even startling, in spots, because he is not a native English speaker. (He gives a couple of nods in the text to his literary hero Joseph Conrad.) Sometimes this unusual phrasing is quite awkward, though, Pynchon-like, and most of the "short stories" as I was reading them felt like a long march, like I had to force my way through them to finish them, because there's no arc of narrative, no tension, nothing pulling me along to read to the end, to make me *want* to get to the end. The Sorge Spy Ring is one of those stories. I almost gave up reading the entire book trying to get through this one. But I'm glad I persevered. The final story, Imitation of Life, reads like a delicate musical composition.

As a whole, the stilted language and drudgery are a 1, the marvelous passages of prose scattered throughout are a 5.

It's okay
2/5 Goodreads
3/5 Amazon