Growing up I never understood why my grandmother who lived through WW2 avoided watching war movies at all costs. Then I got to experience war firsthand and I understood. I tend to avoid war themed books but this is Aleksandar Hemon, one of my favorite authors so I braced myself and dove right in. This book wrecked me, broke me and built me up again and it took me days to work my way through all the emotions it left me sitting with. The World and All That It Holds is a love story, a war story, poetry in motion but most of all it is a deeply emotional literary journey of characters I will never forget.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo changed the course of history and started WW1. It also leads Rafael Pinto away from the comfort of running his family's apothecary into the trenches of Galicia. The horrors of war are softened only because of the stolen moments of tenderness and affection with Osman, another Bosnian soldier. Stories and memories of home, folklore and sevdah (traditional Bosnian music), the worst and the best of humanity, and an unexpected love story of a Bosnian Jew and a Bosnian Muslim, all of it combined felt like a symphony of emotions in a literary form.

I cried so much reading this story. There was so much love, tenderness but also so much pain in these pages. Hemon is a master storyteller who is not afraid to play with language(s) and every once in a while I would have to pause and marvel at this author's brilliance. And reach for my box of tissues. This book is complex, beautifully written AND demanding. And as icing on the cake, Aleksandar Hemon collaborated with an incredibly talented Bosnian musician whose work I absolutely love - Damir Imamovic, who will be releasing an album to accompany this novel. I will be recommending this book to all of my fellow literary fiction lovers - it really is that good.

A huge thank you to Netgalley, Penguin Random House Canada & Farrar, Straus and Giroux for gifting me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Very beautiful and lyrical story. A story of war and love and so many other things. A must read for anyone who loves deep historical fiction stories. It was a tough read to get through but at the end it was so worth it. For sure one to pick up if you really want to immerse yourself in a totally different setting than you are used too. Pinto and Osman will always have my heart.

I tried to like this book, but just could not get into it. DNF. I think it was more of a male interest book.

This book was a slog for me, much like the journey the main character Rafael Pinto embarks upon across Europe and Asia at the outset of World War I and up through the early days of World War II. The storytelling and historical context were rich and layered. I think the book will be appealing to other readers who are more familiar with this genre.

I received an advance reader copy of The world and All that It Holds from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Beautifully written tale of love and war. The language and imagery is often exquisite, and I love that it focuses on characters and settings that usually don't get much attention in historical fiction. The story does get a bit monotonous as it goes on, and for a tale that covers over forty years, it doesn't feel as epic as it should. But its best moments are extremely powerful and beautiful.

Actual rating 3.5

World shaking in depth of experiences lived, this is an encompassing tale of love found and lost (but not truly lost) and the lengths one man goes to to survive for that love. War and violence are prevalent in his world, and truly shocking events are somehow borne with an inexplicable hope. The writing is truly astounding and dares you to not feel you are right beside Pinto and Osman and Rahela living life with them. My main issue with this story was the frequent use of various languages in phrases that could not be translated and did not lend themselves to interpretation by context. It became hard to lose myself in the story when lack of understanding kept pulling me out. Perhaps that was intentional by Hemon as a way to illustrate that we can never know the entire world, but for me it was an unwelcome distraction and didn't lend itself to a positive feeling about the experience.

My thanks to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux/MCD, the author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The World and All That It Holds contains a lot to unravel. If you like a book that makes you work for it... sending you down rabbit holes and side readings about geographical areas, languages, religion, and war events deeper than we learned in school, then this book is absolutely perfect for you. It is a difficult read, with inclusion of several languages, some with adjacent translation and some you interpret contextually. While a little difficult to get into, once you pick up that you do not need to Google translate every non-English phrase, the story beautifully unravels for you. Imagine yourself immersed in a country or culture not your own and how you just pick things up, just as the books characters do in their life journeys through war and displacement.

As a pharmacist, I was excited to read a story involving another pharmacist, Rafael Pinto, a Sephardi running his father's apothecary in Sarajevo when (bang, bang), Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated just beyond his shop door. As WWI breaks out, Pinto is conscripted into the Army and shipped off to Galicia where in his wartime doctoring and suffering, he meets the love of his life, Osman, a Muslim soldier from Bosnia. Yes, this is a gay love story and a love story that crosses religious divides. But it is also a sweeping story of war, of survival, of history, of found family, and of love between a father and daughter.

From the epilogue, we learn that the book is based on a true story when the author tells his own story of how he met Rahela. How much is true and how much is creative license, we will never know. But isn't that history in a nutshell? History is the stories of those who lived life's events once they had opportunity to digest their experiences, including the omissions and lies our brains tell us to keep us sane or protect the image we prefer to be remembered by. Truth in history is evasive as soon as the present becomes the past. "If you live long enough, you learn that nothing has ever been, nor will it ever be, the way it used to be." Aleksandar Hemon could not have written truer words.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and MCD and #NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

Heartache, love, and adventure - it's all here. A beautiful cultural immersion that remains real, gritty, and full of love and longing. A great read.

In 1914 in Sarajevo, Rafael Pinto is going about his business at his family's pharmacy, unaware that the world, and his own life, is about to change forever. Later that afternoon, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is killed, leading to the outbreak of World War I. Pinto soon finds himself as a soldier on the front, doing whatever he can to survive as the war rages around him. There, he meets a fellow solider, Osman, and the two soon begin a relationship, the one bright spot in each of their lives. The two manage to survive the trenches only to find themselves enmeshed in other conflicts as they travel across continents in search of a path home, and a path back to each other.

This is a bold book in its ambitions, and it succeeds. Through compelling characters, most especially Pinto, the book explores important themes around love, conflict, hope, hopelessness, and survival.

Highly recommended!

A love story for the ages… Pinto and Osman, both having lived in Sarajevo, meet and an undeniable bond develops with love than spans their lifetimes and beyond. The story starts with a bang, literally the shots that begins with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Both Pinto and Osman join in the war and the story follows the horrors of their experiences in the war and the aftermath. I found the story confusing at times as it seemed to move on and then return, one example being that Osman appeared to be dying and was dragged out of their internment camp in Tashkent. It appeared he was dead but then appears again, hale and hearty, in a leadership role of the opposition. I reread several times to make sense of what happened but then just read on. I was not sure until midway through if Osman was really alive or just alive in Pinto’s hallucinations.
The story is dark but the love shines through…Pinto and Osman, Pinto and Rahela, and Osman and Rahela. Pinto and Rahela’s torturous travels on their way to Shanghai and their life there made me feel so guilty at the easy life I live. I was incredulous that Pinto was able to keep Rasheda alive, as a newborn without any source of milk for her after he left. The scene of their hiding in the barrel was so very perilous and I was so worried her cry would get them both killed. My bones were so weary, my stomach so empty, and my heart so heavy for them on their 7 year journey through the desert especially. The concurrent lives of Moser made me angry I have to admit. Those that have continue to have I guess.
I was dismayed by the many sections where the writing was not in English and I was left wondering if those unknown sentiments would help me better understand all that I was reading. My very favorite parts were those where Osman appeared, coaching Pinto and finally Rahela when they most needed his love.
Although I was certainly confused at times and dismayed about the words I could not understand, the power of the story and Aleksander Hemon’s writing is not to be denied. Loved the quote, “The living out of the dead and the dead out of the living.” So apropos for much of this story. Many many thanks to Aleksander Hemon and NetGalley for affording me the opportunity to read this incredible story.

I received a complimentary Electronic ARC of this wonderous tale from Netgalley, the author Aleksandar Hemon, and Publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Our story begins in June 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which pushed most industrialized countries of the world into the Great War, or as we now call it World War I. We travel through time and history to explore from Sarajevo to Shanghai. With his lover and fellow soldier, Osman, our hero Pinto makes his way through the times and troubles of the twentieth century, bringing us fascinating stories and a positive look at our shared past and the potential for tomorrow.

Thank you MCD and Net Galley for offering me an advanced readers' copy of this remarkable novel. Rafael Pinto, a young Bosnian Jew, is working in the apothecary in Sarajevo he inherited from his father, fantasizing about the dashing cavalry officer who had entered the store, and the future was bright. “We now lived in a brand-new century,” Hemon writes, “progress was everywhere to behold, the future was endless, like a sea — nobody could see the end of it.” Then, Pinto witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which was “the exact moment, no longer than what passes between heartbeats, that broke the world in two, into the before and the after.” Pinto is quickly conscripted into the Imperial Army along with tens of thousands of other Bosnians, embarking upon an epic, decades- and continents-spanning adventure.
Hemon writes about the horror of war, such as the Brusilov Offensive, one of the most lethal offensives in history, but he juxtaposes these atrocities with Pinto’s soaring romance with the handsome and charming Muslim soldier, Osman Karišik. Osman is the man “Pinto was born to love” and Osman, in turn, protects and loves Pinto, and together, they escape the madness of the war, encountering Bolsheviks, Cossacks, English spies, and a cast of characters whose lives were upended by conflict. Even when Pinto is left rotting in a frigid Russian jail in Turkestan, Osman remains at his side as Pinto imagines living with Osman in a cabin “high up in the mountains, far from other people, from their gossip and judgment, from their murderous plans for a perfect future.”
Pinto’s drug addiction makes him an unreliable narrator, but it seems that Osman perished and Pinto “someone who must suffer alone, someone destined to spend in sickness and isolation what little life he had left.” Yet, Pinto delivers a child, Rahela, whom he believes was fathered by Osman. Pinto protects the infant and perseveres in the belief that “Osman was with him as long as Rahela was with him.” Pinto and Rahela spend years trekking aimlessly through the desert with other refugees and relying on the kindness of strangers, ultimately making their way to Shanghai. “Like all refugees, they kept moving forward because they had nowhere to else to go; being on the move meant being alive.” Although Osman had been absent for as long as Rahela had been alive, his voice continues to haunt Pinto as Pinto and Rahela survive.
Although the depictions of war and its aftershocks is grim and relentless, Hemon’s beautiful prose elevates this tale that is, at bottom, about the resilience of love.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Rafael Pinto is a dreamy young man in Sarajevo in 1914, kissing handsome men and taking the occasional laudanum, when he witnesses the killing of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife and his world will never be the same. He’s thrown into the trenches of World War One and runs from one enemy after another for the next thirty plus years of his life as he remembers his great love, Osman, a great warrior who protects Pinto at all times, even when they have been separated, Osman will still whisper in his ear, and Pinto also remembers the family he left behind. A harrowing story that is filled with haunting images, but also great warmth and even dark humor.

I had read a few of Aleksandar Hemon's books over a decade ago and was so excited to see this new one be announced. He's an amazing writer and his way with words is so beautiful. This one took awhile for me to get in to, but once I was I really loved the characters and the amazing storytelling.

The scope of this book is quite large -- it follows Rafael Pinto as his life progresses from Sarajevo to Shanghai, and over many decades. Life is not easy for him, and I continually hoped that his circumstances would improve.

By the end I was very sad to say goodbye to all of the characters and would definitely have read more about their lives, stories, and dreams. The bond between the characters is really moving, and will stick with me for a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book!

Terror of an Absent Future

Even in the beginning of World War I, the worst existence is one of being a Jew and/or a homosexual. Rafael Pinto is a Bosnian Jew. He was schooled in Vienna and when he completed his formal education, he went to Sarajevo to take over his deceased father’s apothecary.

He witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which detonates World War I – the war to end all wars, (but it wasn’t). Rafael fears conscription and with good reason. He is sent to combat, far away from Sarajevo, total outsider as a Jew and homosexual. He has more than a working knowledge of drugs and finds some escape into the world of addiction.

His life changes when he meets a Muslim soldier who seems to be a kindred spirit. Osman is aggressive and entices Rafael into the forbidden existence. In a day to day survival, Rafael has little purpose in life except to be with Osman. Random executions are an everyday occurrence. Who will be next? We for a possible next day in life. Giving into death is not a natural choice.

The books spans decades filled with unyielding despondency. Pinto is freed from his cell by Osman and they are aided by a Jewish doctor. Then bad things happened again: the Bolsheviks invade the country and the despondency of war pervades one’s very soul. Osman, ironically, has a daughter whom Rafaela must protect.

Despair is on every page of this novel. It is mixed in with the characters’ innumerable languages and dialect. This technique, although astute, confused me from the beginning of the novel.

What did the story tell me? So much despair, fear of dying pushes us to live? When I finally “met” Rahela, the daughter of Osman and Padri Rafo, the power of this story came to light.
Dear reader, you must read the Epilogue to fully understand the source of this narrative. It is a brilliant epic based on inspiration.

My gratitude to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this pre-published book. All opinions expressed are my own.

Aleksandar Hemon’s miraculous new novel #TheWorldAndAllItHolds is an ode to the coexistence of the beauty and wretchedness on planet Earth and one man’s journey through it while discovering two of life’s inescapable tenents : 1) Wherever you go you’ve never left, and 2) There’s no place like home. #The World And All It Holds is an absorbing tale that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it. Truly heartfelt !

The new reading year has begun with bang with this astonishing work of literary fiction. The book opens in Sarajevo, 1914: the Jewish Rafael Pinto is daydreaming, mixing herbs and medicines in his father's apothecary shop. He dreams of love, of being a medical student again in Vienna, arguing philosophy in cafes and bedding handsome fellow students.

Pinto follows a handsome soldier out of the shop, and becomes a witness to history: blocks away Archduke Franz Ferdinand will be assassinated. This bloody deed will kickstart World War 1 and Pinto's decades-long trek across continents. We see him next as a doctor in the Austrian-Hungarian Army, where he meets the love of his life--the orphan raconteur Osman Karisik, a Bosnian Muslim. We see both Pinto and Osman in a POW camp, then dodging Bolsheviks in Tashkent. Osman may or may not be dead, but Pinto has found a reason to live: Osman has left behind an infant daughter named Rahela. With other refugees Pinto makes his way to Shanghai, only to become a refugee again during the World War II. Rahela becomes a headstrong young woman, determined to make her own mistakes for love. The story ends half a century later and on another continent, in Jerusalem, on the eve of another act of violence, September 11, 2001.

In beautiful, immersive prose, the reader is taken on this tumultuous journey, encountering persecution, loss, friendship, regret, and always--always--love. The reader will smell lavender and opium, know the stink of fear and heady erotic pleasure.

This is a fascinating novel. It's a deeply Jewish story of displacement and of longing for home; a story of war and 20th century history through the eyes of fascinating individuals; a profoundly human story of what makes us persist in living, and of finding meaning in love. There are few books I've read that I can say changed me. The World and All That It Holds may be one of them.

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.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The World and All That It Holds is surely a modern classic that will be studied by future generations. It is literary fiction at is best- exquisite writing, unforgettable characters, a captivating plot. It is both sweeping, including many conflicts, countries, languages, but also intimate, with the love between 2 men, and between a father and a daughter, at its core. The novel, along with the world and all that it holds, includes terrible suffering, devastation, loss as well as humor, hope and love. The epilogue is a must read and truly enriches the reading experience.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I started reading Aleksandar Hemon because he was involved with Sense8 (which I LOVED) and I haven't been disappointed yet. His writing is lovely, his stories are fascinating, and reading his books is a pleasure. Just so good.