By the Book

The Question of Bruno: Storiesby Aleksandar Hemon

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 230 pp., $22.50

Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon's collection of short stories, The Question of Bruno, hums with the irreconcilable tensions of wonder and revulsion. In the collection's best stories, each sentence is beautifully discordant, and, like the telegraph messages the young boy in "The Sorge Spy Ring" sends to his absent father, each is charged with longing and suppressed anger.

In the opening story, "Islands," a nine-year-old boy travels to a small island to visit his uncle, who tells him both tall tales about the island and of his own suffering in a Stalinist concentration camp. In Hemon's stories, as in Kafka's, fantasy and suffering are intertwined:

Uncle Julius told us that when he was in the Arkhangelsk camp, Stalin and his parliament devised a law that said if you were repeatedly late for school or missed several days with no excuse, you would get six months to three years in a camp. So, suddenly ... the camp was full of children. ... They didn't know what to do in the camp, so the criminals took the nicest looking to their quarters and fed them and, you know (no, I didn't), abused them. So they were there. They died like flies...

This mixture of fantasy and suffering is evoked again in the aforementioned "The Sorge Spy Ring," when a boy imagines that his father is a spy based on the strange toys he brings home from his business trips to the Soviet Union. And, as if the objective world has conspired to solidify the boy's fantasy, his father is soon arrested:

There were no screeching cars in the middle of the night, any marble-faced men in leather coats, no terrified, shivering neighbors too scared to look through the peephole, no breaking doors. ... They simply called him on the phone. He hung up and said to my mother: "They want me about some traffic violation. It must be some misunderstanding. I'll be back shortly."

Hemon is often at his best in the smaller moments culled from staggering events. We are privy to Archduke Ferdinand's last moments of consciousness before his assassination, in the short short, "The Accordion." While riding in his carriage, the Archduke is drawn to a man in the crowd holding an accordion with a missing key: "The archduke wonders about these strange people, about this man who doesn't seem to possess any hatred towards him and the Empire (not yet, at least) and he begins to wonder what happened to that key. Could you play a song without that key?"

A few of the stories stumble when they don't let the smaller moments speak for the larger. Hemon smacks the reader over the head with metaphors of predator and prey in "A Coin," for instance, when the natural accumulation of detail in this story about a family of Bosnians pinned down by sniper fire is powerful enough. And the novella, "Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls," seems, at times, an overly long chronicle of an immigrant's arrival in America, and though it is intermittently funny, its vilification of American crassness seem too obvious a target for a writer of his talent. But ultimately, Aleksandar Hemon's prose and moral vision win out, and these imperfections don't mar the discordant beauty of The Question of Bruno.