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Published Mar 2021
204 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
"Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die." When a writer suffers a heart attack at the age of fifty, he must confront his mortality in a country that is not his native home.
Confined to a hospital bed and overcome by a sense of powerlessness, he reflects on the fragility of life and finds extraordinary meaning in the quotidian. In this affecting autobiographical novel, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the love he and his family have for one another, strengthened by trauma; their harrowing experience of the Bosnian war, which led them to flee for the United States as refugees; eerie premonitions of Donald Trump's presidency; the life and work of a writer; and the nature of memory and grief.
Poetically explosive and pure to the core, My Heart serves as a kind of mirror, reflecting our human strengths and weaknesses along with the most important issues on our minds--love and death, the present and the past, sickness and health, leaving and staying.
"[P]owerful...Aleksandar Hemon calls Mehmedinović his favorite living Bosnian writer, and Mehmedinović echoes Hemon's work in its moments of playfulness, grace, and wonder as well as its blunt observations about the trauma of war and leaving one's homeland. Few books are this good at capturing an immigrant's sense of loss." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An intimate, yet profound and lyrical portrait of a man and his family...Superbly translated by Celia Hawkesworth, My Heart is an introspective, literary journey worth taking." – Booklist (starred review)
"Mehmedinović's poetic side reveals itself via achingly beautiful imagery and recurring motifs. And he is a remarkably prescient observer of America, including its "closing up" over the past 20 years, shown in the way foreign languages used to 'arouse...curiosity, not aversion, certainly not fear.' A deeply personal and incisive look at memory, anchored by astute observations." - Kirkus Reviews
"A marvel of thoughtfulness and love." – Aleksandar Hemon, Literary Hub
"Readers will discover that Mehmedinovoić's powerfully affecting and honest tale of the dizzy perimeter of mortality is also the oldest and best kind of story: one of love." - Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances and American Innovations
"One of the most endearingly ruminative, sweetly sorrowful short novels I have ever encountered. A quietly devastating portrait of grief and loss, the soul-ache of exile, and the sustaining power of familial love, My Heart broke mine." - Dan Sheehan, author of Restless Souls
"My Heart is a family memoir, a personal account, a travelogue, a history, an immigrant story, and more, much more. A brilliant, unforgettable book, concise yet expansive, both microscopic and universal in its scope. It's a record of the everyday, of the quotidian as informed by our PTSD. An astonishing achievement." - Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman
"Intelligent, honest, and full of heart, Mehmedinović's novel has all the qualities one might seek in a friend. Like a friend, it is honest enough to tell you even the harshest of truths, and, like a true friend, it ensures that you will never feel alone while you read it, even in its most heartbreaking moments." - Etgar Keret, author of The Seven Good Years
This information about My Heart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Semezdin Mehmedinovic was born in 1960 in Kiseljak near Tuzla. He studied comparative literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. A poet and an essayist, Mehmedinovic has held the position of an editor in newspapers, weeklies, as well as on the radio and television. He has edited a number of culture magazines and has been involved in the film industry. Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias have been published among his other works. Since 1996, he has been living in the United States.
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