My Heart

Bosnian writer Mehmedinović (Sarajevo Blues) returns with a powerful autofictional gut punch of a novel. “Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die,” says narrator Meh’med about the near-fatal heart attack in his Washington, D.C., apartment in 2010 and his subsequent time spent in the hospital. After surgery and rehab, Meh’med feels compelled to revisit the first place he lived in the U.S. after he fled Sarajevo in 1996 during the Bosnian War, so he and his adult son, Harun, head to Phoenix. While tension brews between them, Meh’med finds comfort in their silent moments together, and in sharing their memories. After Meh’med’s wife, Sanja, has a stroke, Meh’med remembers how she’d been his savior, standing between him and a rifle barrel in Sarajevo, and their combined melancholy as immigrants (“the antagonism of two worlds is the essence of exile”). What they have lost individually and together movingly permeate Meh’med’s memories as he cares for Sanja after her stroke. In an introduction, Aleksandar Hemon calls Mehmedinović his favorite living Bosnian writer, and Mehmedinović echoes Hemon’s work in its moments of playfulness, grace, and wonder as well as its blunt observations about the trauma of war and leaving one’s homeland. Few books are this good at capturing an immigrant’s sense of loss. (Mar.)