Once in a while a novel comes along that, on the surface, looks quite awful. It might have a silly title: The Making Of Zombie Wars, for instance. Its protagonist might be a writer: let’s say an aspiring screenwriter called Joshua Levin. And the plot outline might seem mediocre: when Joshua comes home one day to find his landlord engaged in suspicious activity he moves in with his girlfriend, Kimmy, and decides it is about time he left his student days behind him and became a proper adult, only to become adolescently infatuated with another woman. It is a measure of Alexsandar Hemon’s talent that he can present the reader with this sort of thing and yet write something extremely funny and profound. Zombie Wars is a kind of serious farce, if such a thing can exist. It makes a mockery of our contemporary attitude to violence whilst alerting us to the void that emerges when life is reduced to a series of throwaway jokes.
It is not often the words of Jewish philosopher Baruch de Spinoza and George Bush Jr that are shored up against one another, but Hemon opens his second novel with quotes from both. Bush’s words speak to an irrational fear of an imminent invasion: "when I was growing up, it was a dangerous world and you knew exactly who they were… today we’re not sure who the they are, but we know they’re there." The Iraq War fires away on television screens in the background throughout Hemon’s novel, set in a Chicago. Joshua’s landlord, Staggers, is a psychologically damaged veteran from the first Gulf War who slowly ingratiates himself into Joshua’s life, making every fraught situation worse, partly because he carries around a large Samurai sword. When the violence imagined or experienced as spectacle spills over into bodily reality Joshua realises he can finally finish his film script about a zombie apocalypse.
Spinoza’s words are about the primacy of the body: "the mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures." Josh is a largely non-practising Jew and English Language teacher who is frequently sidetracked by his bodily demands. His affair is with his Bosnian student, Ana. Unfortunately Ana’s husband, Esko, is a ruthless thug. We first encounter him "dismembering what appeared to be a whole lamb stretched on a plank, its head about to pop out in roasted surprise". When Esko finds out about his wife’s liaisons he threatens to butcher Joshua and the plot becomes a frenetic and madcap battle between chest-beating males, a few of them puny only in their lack of intellect.
Hemon’s tone is one of deadpan humour. Joshua is constantly trying to ease his anxiety about his lack of domestic progress. He justifies his dorm-like apartment to himself thus: "Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self." Hemon gives even simple actions a hue of originality: "Ana sat down on the sofa to fully dedicate herself to weeping." This is combined with a comedy of a more overt kind. When Esko realises that in America killing a fellow citizen is not an appropriate response to adultery, he instead turns his attention to Kimmy’s cat, Bushy. "He grasped Bushy’s head with his enormous thick-fingered hand and wrung his neck in one swift move. Bushy attempted a yelp but then went perfectly limp within a blink. Esko laid him down on the table, stroked his head one more time, and stood up."
Hemon is a native of Sarajevo, where the gunshot of 20th-century violence was first fired. He was in Chicago in 1992 when the Bosnian War broke out and was unable to return home. Perhaps that is why there is a strangely large community of Bosnians in his novelistic version of the city. Most of the characters suffer a yearning for an unidentifiable home, and at the end of the novel, once the real violence has retreated, Joshua’s family – all as dysfunctional as he is – and Staggers (by now Joshua’s bizarre sidekick) conduct a lacklustre and strange Seder, the Jewish ritual which describes the Israelites' flight from slavery in Egypt. After the family have drunk their wine ‘for Elijah’, Joshua opens the front door in anticipation of the Prophet. "Who’s coming?" says Staggers. And we are left with that uneasy silence of the void again, the sort that always comes after a good joke.
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