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My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You

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My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You

Written by: Aleksandar Hemon
Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
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About this listen

 An intimate portrait of immigration, family, and the heartbreaking (and sometimes hilarious) things that happen along the way from the author Colum McCann calls "the greatest writer of our generation."

In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents' immigration from Bosnia to Canada--of the lives that were upended in the Siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, Hemon portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother's lonely upbringing, his father's fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country, from the rule of Otto von Bismarck to the massacres that shocked the world. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course--his parents, sister, uncles, cousins--and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav communist revolutionary partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, and a few befuddled Canadians.

That would be enough to astound readers and yet Hemon also shares an untampered series of beautifully distilled memories and observations titled This Does Not Belong to You, the perfect complement to a major work from a major writer who is about to become unignorable. Americas Art & Literature Authors Canada Eastern Europe Witty Funny
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I really struggled to finish this because it really felt like the author, based on his previous success, was given an opportunity to write about himself but didn't know how to do it. The first part, My Family is a bit interesting when focusing on his parents adapting to life in Canada as refugees but the second part, This does not belong to you, is just a series of uninteresting and direction-less anecdotes that only show that the author had an average childhood. Worst of it all is that the narrator, who is the opposite of Eastern European, does a poor job at most of the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian words that it takes you out of what I am assuming the author is trying to convey. Why they didn't hire a Jugovic, or at the very least someone from Eastern Europe, to read the book is frustrating.
Just because someone is well-known does not mean they have enough of an interesting life to share it with others.

Dull and Boring

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