I wanted to read Semezdin Mehmedinović’s ‘My Heart‘ for a while now. I loved Mehmedinović’s book, ‘Sarajevo Blues‘ which I read recently, and so I was very excited to read this one.
‘My Heart’ is Semezdin Mehmedinović’s most recent book. The cover says that it is a novel, while reviewers have called it autofiction. To me, it read like a memoir, and so I looked at it as a memoir.
‘My Heart’ has three parts. In the first part, Semezdin feels uncomfortable and his wife calls an ambulance, and the paramedics take him to the hospital and the doctor says that he has had a heart attack. What happens after that is described in that first part. In the second part, in which the events happen a few years later, Semezdin and his son go on a long road trip to spend some time together on father-son bonding. They visit some old places in which they’d lived, and see how it has changed. Semezdin’s son is a photographer and so he gets to watch how his son works, in desolate places where no one is present. In the third part, Semezdin’s wife has a stroke, and now it is his time to take care of her. What happens after that is described in that part.
The title ‘My Heart’, in my opinion, seems to refer to Semezdin’s physical heart. But it also seems to refer to the longing of his heart for his home country of Bosnia and its capital Sarajevo, his love for the Bosnian language in which he continues to write, and the way he feels as an outsider in his adopted country and in his new language, though he has been there for more than twenty years. It also seems to refer to the love he and his wife Sanja have for each other and how they’d survived the tough times they’d been through together, across the years and across continents, and how their hearts still beat for each other after all these years. I think ‘My Heart’ refers to all these things and it is a beautiful title.
I loved ‘My Heart’. Semezdin Mehmedinović’s writing is beautiful and it is an absolute pleasure to read. There are so many beautiful passages in the book that I couldn’t stop highlighting. Celia Hawkesworth brings out the beauty of Semezdin Mehmedinović’s writing in her wonderful translation. There is also a beautiful introduction by Aleksandar Hemon at the beginning of the book, which is a pleasure to read. I loved ‘My Heart’ even more than ‘Sarajevo Blues’, and it is one of my favourite reads of the year.
I’m sharing below some of my favourite passages from the book. Sorry I’ve gone overboard with the quotes 😊🙈
“All my life I have borne the burden of my meaningless name. But I came to terms with that early on, convinced it was after all just a name, that it didn’t matter what a boat was called, just that it could sail, and that we fill the being bearing our name with the glow of our being. It was a consoling thought. It’s only today, in my fifty-sixth year, that I have completely accepted and identified with my name. This is why. The doctor asks her: “What year is this? Which month? Where are we now?” She looks at him and there’s no reply, she has forgotten the year and the month and the place. Then the doctor points at me, sitting beside her bed, “And who is this man?” For a moment she settled her gaze, she appeared to be looking right through me, and I felt a chill run through my whole body. And I thought: She’s forgotten me. But then her face experienced a total transformation, she looked at me as though she had saved me from nonexistence, or as though she had just given birth to me, and with an expression of the purest love she said: “Semezdin, my Semezdin.” And that was the moment when my name filled with meaning. I was her Semezdin. That is my love story, and my whole life.”
“Was I now supposed to act like someone ill? I didn’t want to. No. In Chekhov’s diaries there is a short note, a sketch for a story, about a man who went to the doctor, who examined him and discovered a weakness in his heart. After that the man changed the way he lived, took medicines, and talked obsessively about his weakness; the whole town knew about his heart, and all the town’s doctors (whom he consulted regularly) talked about his illness. He didn’t marry, he stopped drinking, he always walked slowly and breathed with difficulty.
Eleven years later, he traveled to Moscow and went to see a cardiologist. That was how it emerged that his heart was, in fact, in excellent shape. To begin with, he was overjoyed at his health. But it quickly turned out that he was unable to return to a normal way of life, as he was completely adapted to his rhythm of going to bed early, walking slowly, and breathing with difficulty. What’s more, the world became quite tedious for him, now that he could no longer talk about his illness.”
“Someone had just come into the room and greeted Lukas with “How you doin’?” To which he replied: “Dobro.” It was a reflex response in Slovak, a language that at this time was evidently closer to him. The person to whom the old man directed his dobro didn’t understand the word. The old man had been separated from his Slovak language for some seventy years. And now the word came out of him, as it were, unconsciously. But this linguistic muddle had an emotional effect on me. As though now, close to death, the old man was preparing to face death in his own language. When he pronounced his dobro it confirmed for me that I was in a foreign, distant land. That was a most unusual experience of language. Sanja was sitting by my bed, and when she heard the old man say dobro, as though in our shared language, her eyes automatically filled with tears.”
“And I remembered a short film called The Room. There was a long scene of bathing in it. A body with water pouring over it. This is the story : A young man walks down the street as the light is fading, and through the open window of a room, above him, he hears the sound of a piano. And he stops. Then he sees the silhouette of the girl who was playing the piano. But the reason he stops is not only the music he heard or only the girl whose silhouette he saw. He doesn’t know where the attraction comes from, he doesn’t know the reason for his stopping, but he is aware of a strong magnetic pull from that room, sensed through the open window. And years pass. He leaves that town and lives all over the world, then as an old man he returns. He buys an apartment and lives out his last years in it. After bathing, he leaves his room and hears the siren of an ambulance stopping in front of his building. It is night. And then he becomes conscious of everything. The room where he now finds himself is the room he had once seen, as a young man, while the sound of a piano reached him through the open window. And why had he felt such a strong attraction? The young man could not have known what the old man knew now: what he had seen then was his room, the one in which, when the time came, he would die.”
“Last Thursday I went for a routine six-month checkup at the doctor’s. I would like to free myself from the medication I have been taking for nearly five years now, which makes me tired and slows me down. I want to speed up, to run, because I want to get back into my life. The doctor, a young Sikh with a pale mauve turban, said: “No, no. The medication is to prevent a heart attack.” I know, I say, but I would like to free myself of its side effects, and I’ll worry about a heart attack in a different way. He assures me that the side effects of this medication are innocuous in comparison to its positive effects on my organism. I ask: “And, in fact, what are its real side effects?” He says there are several, but none of them kill you. “For instance?” “Well, say, memory loss.” “Does that mean I could forget everything?” “Yes, but forgetting doesn’t kill you,” says the cardiologist. I ask: “If I forget everything, my whole life, if I can’t recognize my child’s face, if I forget my own name, isn’t that the same as dying?”
“We like to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about the world, life, and man. But we ought to ask ourselves again and constantly: Why fill our lives with such effort and torment, when we know that we will be here only once and when we have such a brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world?”
“Escape is possible only as an individual act. Only an individual can escape. To escape as a group, even if into a desert, ends with one form or other of the problematic structuring of life in a human community. Manson himself asserted that even the smallest community tends toward a totalitarian structure and eventually ends in massacre. Zabriskie Point shows that escape is impossible, or that you can escape only alone, and only on the condition that you are not attached to other people, or possessions.”
“My wishes weren’t big, but still none of them came to anything. I longed for a small window from which one could see blue water. I imagined that in my fifties I would live a peaceful life, with time freed up just for writing. I wanted a small shady café where I would meet with friends on a Saturday or Sunday morning to gossip about our past. But I ended up as a prisoner on a vast continent, alone, without people to talk to. A foreigner. And I have grown accustomed to this solitude, I have accepted it as payback for the sins I have committed in my life. And in exchange for my unfulfilled wishes.”
“My world is in my language, and I’ve never begun to write in the language of the country where I’m now living. To be truly accepted, to transform myself from a foreigner into a local, a precondition is restructuring into the new language. And that’s fine. I have chosen to remain a foreigner. Once, some ten years ago, after the translation of my second book came out, an American poet explained to me, in a restaurant in Iowa, that all my problems would be solved as soon as I started writing in English. She said, very seriously, that I should just make a rough translation of my poems, she’d sort out the language, and then I could publish them as originals. She literally suggested that. I said that I didn’t have any problems that needed solving. I thanked her and explained that this one language in which I wrote was enough for me, and I wouldn’t want to change it. But, following my explanation, her eyes filled with tears. To be honest, her offer had offended me, but the fact that she ended up crying completely disconcerted me. I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t understand the real reason for her tears. Perhaps she hadn’t expected my reaction, and now her offer had been shown to be discourteous, but perhaps she was really sad to see in me a stranger who couldn’t be helped? She looked at me as though she had just found out that I had a disease from which I would soon die.”
“About ten years ago, when he was in college, Harun went to the Slavic department to take a foreign-language exam. The foreign language in this case was his mother tongue, but from an American perspective there was no room for doubt, the local language was English and every other language was foreign. The examiner, Michael Heim, met him in his book-filled office. Harun introduced himself and asked about the possibility of taking an exam. The professor suggested that he take the exam immediately, if he felt ready. And then he went to a shelf and took down a book from which Harun was to read, to confirm his knowledge of his own language. Professor Heim put the book down on the table in front of the student and suggested that he read from the page to which he’d opened at random. And so it was. Harun began to read the text, trying to hide his smile. The professor noticed his student’s unusual behavior, interrupted his reading, and asked: “The character in the story has the same name as you?” And Harun said: “Yes, but that’s because this story is about me, I am the character in the story.” His response astonished Professor Heim, he took the book from his hand, looked at the open page, then back at the student: “All these years, I have read a lot of books in this room, but this is the first time that I have spoken in real life to a character from a story.” The book was Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović.”
Have you read Semezdin Mehmedinović’s ‘My Heart’? What do you think about it?