Aleksandar Hemon, "Szmura's Room"

Perhaps my favorite story in Aleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles is "Szmura's Room" which relates the lonely, lost existence of the Bosnian immigrant Bogdan as he rents a room in Chicago from the thuggish loan shark Mike Szmura. Reading the story (first in The New Yorker, then again in the book) I was genuinely touched by Bogdan's quietly desperate striving for human connection, in the midst of a bewildering new world, with the elderly landlady who lives across the hall.

But one thing about "Szmura's Room" bothered me. Although the story focuses almost exclusively on Bogdan, it is told by a first-person narrator who is one of Szmura's poker buddies. The narrator tells of Bogdan's thoughts and private experiences, neither of which the narrator (who barely knows Bogdan) could possibly be privy to. Although the narrator did learn about some of Bogdan's life from the mocking anecdotes related by Szmura at the poker table, the narrator's descriptions of Bogdan are far too expansive to be believable.

Lately I've been very attuned, both in reading and my own writing, of fictional perspective. I'm suspicious of omniscient narrative in general - to me, being able to see inside the heads of an entire cast of characters is about as unrealistic as fiction can get - and even more so when it's in the first person. When I came across the inconsistency of the narrator relating far more about Bogdan than he could possibly know, I was highly put off, as it tainted my otherwise great enjoyment of the story.

But then it hit me. [SPOILER ALERT.] The narrator - a Bosnian immigrant himself, albeit of an earlier vintage than Bogdan - quietly discloses that he previously rented that same room from Szmura. Presumably the narrator did so when he, like Bogdan, found himself in a strange new country with nowhere else to turn, but later moved out once he had established a new independent life for himself. Thinking through the potential implications, I finally realized that most of what the narrator tells of Bogdan is not about Bogdan at all - instead, the narrator projects his own past onto Bogdan to fill in the gaps of the latter's life of which the narrator lacks direct knowledge. When he tells of Bogdan being ridiculed by Szmura, or enduring the overhearing of Szmura and girlfriend going at it in the next room, or perusing the pathetic displays at the musty Bosnian heritage museum which the landlady curates out of a storefront, the narrator is actually relating his own experiences, ones which he might have forgotten but were dredged up upon learning of the new immigrant renting Szmura's room. The narrator clearly sees Bogdan as a younger version of himself - and this transference gives the story a glimmer of hope. Since the narrator implies that he has managed to carve out a new life for himself in America, then maybe Bogdan's currently pitiful plight won't be permanent either.

This subtle projection or transference is a fine crafted literary touch on the part of Hemon, and a great example of why I enjoy his writing as much as I do.