This story starts with a bang…literally…with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the start of WWI. At its core, it is a love story between two men, Pinto and Osman, one a Jew and one a Muslim, who endure many hardships, from fighting side-by-side in the doomed Austro-Hungarian army to surviving a ruthless POW situation. After the war ends, the two men become separated and the narrative follows Pinto as he wanders for years as a refugee across Asia. Pinto has with him what may be Osman’s daughter, a girl who Pinto himself helped deliver and whose mother Pinto watched die.

This book is brutal, but it also offers hope for enduring love. It’s pages offer a reflection on love, war, family and religion and all the messiness that is life. I had some difficulty getting into the book at first. I lost track of the narrative. But, like Pinto, I endured and was rewarded with a special read. The vivid imagery of the war and its aftermath, and the beautiful story of love were truly affecting. Recommended for anyone who has a heart.

Big thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an e-ARC of this novel.

The cover and everything else about this one was beautiful. I highly recommend for a story to get you in your feels.

Pinto, the son of a Jewish apothecary in Sarajevo, was made for gentler times. He’s a dreamer. He seeks love and pleasant sensations and ease. He doesn’t know it but, when we first meet him in Aleksandar Hemon’s shattering novel The World and All That It Holds, his world is about to vanish into chaos and bloodshed. On the day that the novel begins, Pinto opens the family shop, flirts with a Viennese military officer, and wanders into a curbside seat for the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Pinto is almost instantly drafted into a Bosnian regiment of the doomed Austro-Hungarian army. We know that Pinto is headed into one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, so it’s kind of funny that he meets the love of his life in the middle of a warzone.

The first half of The World and All That It Holds follows Pinto and Osman as they are tossed from trench to forest and back to trench as armies fight over patches of Eastern Europe. Osman is one of those supremely competent people who you would want on your side in any kind of fight or crisis. He can get along with anyone, fix anything, and fight anyone the Russians throw at them. He and dreamy Pinto instantly connect. Pinto loves Osman’s gift for storytelling and Pinto arouses Osman’s protective instincts. They know full well that they have to hide their love from the other members of the regiment but there is enough time in between fighting for them to fall deeply in love. After the war, they tell each other, they’ll go back to Sarajevo and spend the rest of their lives together.


We know, however, that Pinto and Osman’s dream will have to remain a dream. A couple of years into the war, the pair are captured by the now-Soviet army and are shipped to Central Asia. After several near-death experiences, the two actually do manage to have a little more time and peace together before history interferes again. I don’t want to give away too much of what happens after Pinto and Osman are sent to Central Asia because a large part of the tension in this book comes from not knowing, first, what new disaster is going to strike, and, second, not knowing if either Pinto or Osman fail to survive that disaster.

Hemon really knows how to play the emotions. Over the course of this novel, there are some stunning highs; sweet, lazy afternoons of love; harrowing terror; inexpressible sorrow; incredible endurance and courage; despair; and heavy doses of reality. Hemon blends those doses of reality with Pinto’s day-dreaming about the sacrifice of Isaac, stories about heroes and vila, opium hallucinations and withdrawal, and so much more. There is just so much in this novel.

I strongly recommend this odyssey of historical fiction. It is one of the most thoughtful, beautiful, and heartbreaking books I’ve read in years. Readers who loved Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena will really enjoy The World and All That It Holds.

I preview books to suggest to my various book clubs. They are made up of “senior “ middle class ladies. This book was very difficult to get in to and contained more violence than they wish to read about. The beginning of the book contains a great deal of foreign language paragraphs. This can be off putting to readers. I know my groups want to be “grabbed “ by the first chapter or two. Since I didn’t feel it was appropriate for my groups, I put it aside and will read and review at a later date when I have time for leisure reading.

I have entered no finish date because I have not yet completed reading this bo https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5096598966 ok. Currently I do not expect to finish it but a few of the other reviews have convinced me to think about it.
The book begins with a very graphic description of World War One that was hard for me to get through. The title does not hint at what the book hits you with starting right off. I was drafted during the Vietnam War and I realize that war stories no longer hold any appeal for me. Also a disconcerting tool of the author is the use of sentences in various foreign languages that are not translated which each time left me completely blank and wondering why does an author do this.
I’m sure that Hemon is a very accomplished writer but this book just hit me very hard. If you want to know what war is really like this is for you.
I thank the publisher for the arc copy to review.

After finishing this intense novel that cover decade starting during World War One and ending with the epilogue that occurs right before 9/11, which I found most engaging, I wasn't sure if the author was playing a trick on his readers, and he someone was a part of this twisted, painful journey. At times, the novel isn't that easy to follow, in part there are times when there are just too many foreign words dropped where I wondered if I was fully grasping the meaning, and we covered so many years, so many countries, and then, with no particular event, everything fell in place again, and we'd see our main characters, two men deeply in love, refugees of war, once again their journey reuniting with familiar faces, camel farts, opium, war ravaged humans needing medical assistance, and a certain level of beingness just happens while on this trek.

The Bildungsroman is an 18th century novel that traces the growing of a young character into maturity. In many ways, Hemon's novel is an anti-Bildungsroman for the 21st century. Rafael Pinto is a Jewish apothecary in Sarajevo just before the First World War. Pinto is consumed with his longing for sensation - for other men, for opium, for a God who seems wholly absent. His subsequent journey through the world, pursuing his lost love Osman (a Muslim Bosnian), confirms the highs and lows of his sensuality and his continuing pursuit for an absent God. Rafael becomes the quintessential 20th century refugee, buffeted from Sarajevo to Russian to the Mongolian plains all the way to Shanghai, at the mercy of anti-Semites and military oppressors.

Hemon is a master craftsman of the word. Each sentence is delicately shaped to reflect the sights and sounds of Pinto's surroundings, but also Pinto's constant interior monologue as he seeks what he cannot find. (Those familiar with - or inhabiting - the Enneagram Four personality type like myself will immediately identify). Like all good epic novels, Hemon concentrates on the sweep of history through the lens of intimate personal relationship. Pinto's queerness is human and unobtrusive, a love story rather than a blaring political statement. And his relationship with his adopted daughter is another exploration of love and responsibility in itself. Hemon examines global capitalism, the dangers of revolutionary excess, religion and spirituality, sexuality, and family, all in a page-turning love story.

Once again at least half the issue I have is the lack of quotation marks around dialogue but I just could NOT get passed that!

Very difficult book to get through. Very graphic of war starting in 1914 along with two male soldiers in love. It follows through many countries over 3 decades. I frankly saw no message given in the book by the author.

Thanks for the review copy, but not a book for me.

Not for the faint of heart but for the deeper thinkers - it starts in 1914 and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand - many characters the style sometimes hard to hang on to - if you do you will be rewarded with a deep read

I had a hard time getting into this one so have not yet finished. Might try again soon. Others have given very high reviews. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

This is a hard book to review in a way.

You see the beauty of the prose and the brilliance of the author clearly shines through the words. However, the passages in foreign languages make you feel that you were robbed of the full experience of the characters.

It is a dark novel that also makes you realize that there still is so much love in the world that all hope is not lost.

I'm finding this book extremely difficult to read. While I can admire much of the prose as the work of a talented writer, I'm frustrated by the use of so much foreign language vocabulary without translation. It may add a measure of verisimilitude, but in places, it renders what the author is trying to convey incomprehensible, thus making it exceedingly difficult to become and/or stay involved in the story.

My thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for providing me with an electronic ARC. The foregoing is my honest and independent opinion.

A wild, disorienting journey. It is 1914 and Rafael Pinto is in Sarajevo. All he wants to do is have some fun, take drugs, and kiss beautiful men. So far, he is three for three until the assassination of Franz Ferdinand changes the course of Pinto’s existence. We follow Pinto over decades and across continents. We witness his time as a soldier when he falls deeply and mutually in love with the handsome and courageous Osman. And we see how that love enables Pinto to persevere.

Reading The World and All It Holds requires patience and an embrace of the smattering of often untranslated phrases in Bosnian, German, Spanish, etc. In return, readers are rewarded with what is ultimately a love story full of beautiful passages and rumination on life, war, religion, family. The writing is strange and gorgeous, at once full of hilarity and sorrow, and will leave you marveling at Aleksandar Hemon’s talent.

Thank you very much to @fsgbooks and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

This is a very complex book: it is at once a love story between two men, Pinto and Osman; a war story of World War I and beyond; a story of the plight of refugees; a story of family and religion.

Beginning with a firsthand account of the assassination of the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, the story takes the reader through many graphic – and often gory – scenes of hardship and suffering. Pinto does a lot of philosophizing about man and God, the nature of their relationship, why the god of his fathers (he is a Jew) is cruel and capricious – or if he even exists.

I'm a fan of Hemon, but this was sadly not a satisfying read. I don't believe it brings anything new to the already heavy canon of WWI fiction (and non!). The long philosophizing did not resonate with this reader and resulted in a plodding read.

The clarity of the words, the images, the flow, the smells, the tastes, the unknown of it all- the good, the bad, the evil, the
no- holds barred.
Life narrated even larger than Life: a take on periods of history of never-ending conflicts, anguish, pride, cruelty and love.
Aleksandar Hemon telling the stories of his own self-created storytellers: stories of the dark and the deep, God and the godless.
An overloaded caravan of humanity and words.
There are many worlds, many homes. Can we ever love enough?

I first became aware of Aleksandar Hemon when I read his New Yorker essay “The Aquarium,” about the illness and death of his baby daughter Isabel. A novel about the love between Osman (a Muslim) and Pinto (a Jew), both Sarajevans conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI, can hardly be autobiographical, but The World and All That It Holds is permeated with the experience of loss – loss of home, loss of the beloved, loss of family – and with a sense of God as an alien and indifferent force that does what it will without regard to the suffering it inflicts on its creatures. Osman, in his tenderness and his lifesaving interventions, is the one great source of benevolence in Pinto’s world.

Osman appears to Pinto – and, later, to their daughter, Rahela – long after he has almost certainly died. But his appearances have effects in the living world. Is he “real”? The narrative constantly confounds imagination and reality, history and fiction (Major Moser-Ethering and the many, many volumes of his autobiography). The result is disorienting and unstable, like the opium dreams Pinto loses himself in during the fall of the Kuomintang. And like history, and like memory.

I said that The World and All That It Holds can hardly be autobiographical, but the passages set in the Taklamakan desert, during the long crossing of which Pinto works feverishly to keep Rahela alive, are among the most beautiful and moving evocations of love and despair I’ve ever read or ever expect to read. The most important aspect of this book is its heart – its center, its emotional gravity. That’s as real as the Samsara stone Pinto gives Rahela to wear as a pendant.

Devastating and wonderful.

After reading 38% of this novel, I am afraid that I am giving up on it. I expected to like it a great deal, and, in many ways, I really did like it, but I ultimately became too frustrated by the many, many passages in other languages. The characters come from many different places, so their speech in their native tongues makes sense, but it was too much for me. So far, I think that I have encountered passages in French, Spanish, German, Yiddish, Ladino, Bosnian, and Uzbek—sometimes single words, and sometimes phrases, sentences, and strings of sentences. I have to say "I think" because it's often unclear even what language is being spoken, much less what the passage means. The table of contents indicates that some later chapters will be set in Shanghai, so there may be passages in Chinese yet to come. Sometimes the passage is followed by a translation, but usually it's not. I'm sure that the author could not expect his readers to know all these languages, so perhaps he would say that we don't need to understand all these passages in order to understand the novel as a whole, but I find it too frustrating to pass over them over and over again.

I do not like giving bad reviews, but The World and all it Holds was just not a book for me. The story is about Pinto and Osman and their life during the war and beyond. Pinto had a quiet life in Sarajevo until war broke out and he found himself in the trenches in Galicia. There he develops a relationship with Osman.

The author is very descriptive in his writing however the descriptions were too much for me. I do not find such description on war to be something I care to read about. I also did not find the stories that were told by Osman and the other people Pinto and Osman dealt with to be very meaningful. The phrases used in a foreign language were not always translated so I had no idea what they meant. I believe that Pinto and Osman were indeed searching for all that the world holds but so much was confusing to me that I felt like I must have missed the point. They seem to get constantly separated then reunited but I am not sure why or where one of them went.

I understand that there is much in this world that we know nothing about and that it holds much to be discovered, but it just was not presented in a way of interest to me. I thank Net Galley for giving me the opportunity to read this pre-release in exchange for an honest review.

The World and All That It Holds
By Aleksandar Hemon

This is a very complex book: it is at once a love story between two men, Pinto and Osman; a war story of World War I and beyond; a story of the plight of refugees; a story of family and religion.

Beginning with a firsthand account of the assassination of the Archduke and his wife in Sarajavo, the story takes the reader through many graphic – and often gory – scenes of hardship and suffering. Pinto does a lot of philosophizing about man and God, the nature of their relationship, why the god of his fathers (he is a Jew) is cruel and capricious – or if he even exists.

The writing here is very well done. For me, the main drawback to this book was the multitude of phrases and words in different languages – Bosnian, German, bastardized Spanish, and others – which were not translated and could not always be guessed at via context. I found this distracting.

The book as a whole was a hard go, so be prepared to make a concerted effort to get through it. Only the reader can decide if it is worth the