The name of the book is unimportant in this instant, and I’ll refrain from naming the famous, expatriate author. I found an edition of this book on a shelf in the vast, interior reaches of Pálác v Kníghiy on Viktórov Prospekt. The store—one of the largest on the European continent—is a magnet for displaced readers from any and every country rich enough to vomit its moneyed tourists onto Agaran shores. I have never left Agara and I’m not sure that I ever will. Agara is stingy with her citizens: she does not spew them, with bulimic indiscretion upon foreign shores. I am not rich. My fingernails are broken and dirty; I don’t know how to live without my countrymen, and the smell of their armpits. By an account implied, if not overtly offered, by our most cheristed expatriate Author (a rarity, a freak, a sport as common as a white crow), I exist elsewhere. Not here. Some aspect of me is alive and mysterious in the English-language and non-Agaran mind. I don’ tknow how I feel about this, or even if I’m supposed to feel anything at all. I know the author; I’ve made love to him (twice) and will do so again, if his American wife allows it, if his American wife can understand whatever it is that draws two men together (one with dirty fingernails, and one with calloused feet). I want to feel something about that, but nothing is all that I can manage. The book—and no, I’ll never name it—is a collection of interconnected stories. It is a work of fiction, and all resemblences to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. But what does this mean to an Agaran; in our language, we have no words to distinguish fact from fiction. All stories are the same. All stories are simply that. Stories. All events, real and imagined, are a part of history, because the history of actions makes no distinctions between that which happened and that which did not happen. Unreality and reality are not opposites, they’re simply perspectives. This, I think, is why Agara boasts such a prodigious mass of hallucinating geniuses. And so there are coincidences listed in the American Library of Congress. What does it mean if I recognize the photo of a stranger because it illustrates the story of Vodamir and his friend? Who is Vodamir? Why do I recognize him? * Yeah. Okay. Well…um…I’ve finished reading Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and have embarked on an exploration of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno, and though I find Eco to be brilliant, engaging and witty, Aleksandar Hemon is nothing less than a literary god. In The Question of Bruno, fact and fiction blend in ways that simply astound. This isn’t unusual. Hemon’s first actual novelThe Lazarus Project is an equally hypnotic, brutal, beautiful, and muscular work of layering: and some of the best writing I’ve read since— It’s no wonder that Hemon, a Bosnian-American, has inspired…well…a nameless Agaran. The image here…well…um…Aleksandar Hemon writes books for sophisticated grownups, and they have pictures. The short story collection, The Question of Bruno inspired this image, and for those who are interested, please feel free to read Hemon: he is immensely moving, profound, and intoxicating. He is my newest, favorite writer: as good as Mieville, Delany, Morrison, and LeGuin...only with a Bosnian accent. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re having a great week/end.