A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Calm and contemplative, softened by melancholy humor and always alive to
beauty . . . Throughout My Heart, Mr. Mehmedinovic takes up the
exile's perpetual investigation into memory, trying to reconcile the
defining traumas of the past with the tendency of time to scrub them
away: "Remembering and forgetting stand side by side, they're made of
the same substance." That substance, whatever it is, pulses throughout
this noble and large-souled work of literature. --Sam Sacks, Wall
Street Journal
Though it deals with tragedy, My Heart is never depressing, partly
because of the beauty of the language--expertly translated from the
Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth--and partly because of its depth and
honesty of emotion, its intelligence and generosity of spirit, and the
precision and originality of Mehmedinovic's observations . . . [A]
powerful, at once profound and charming book. --Francine Prose, The New
York Times Book Review
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.
