Each of the three parts of the book—“Me’med,” “Red Bandana,” and “Snowflake”—deals, in a slightly different way, with the bread and butter of art and literature: love and death, and the suddenly enhanced presence of each in Mehmedinović’s life. Each piece is structured as a journey—the writer is unmoored from the harbor of home—that replicates the situation of displacement, internal and external, caused by the war. And on each journey, Mehmedinović generates endless discoveries of what was once familiar and is now strange again, because that is the effect of time and the presence of death, as inseparable as Siamese twins with a shared heart, on a thinking writer.

Mehmedinović’s language is simple, but only because his vision is clear; his sentences are determined and peaceful, as though conditioned by an inner calm rooted in his indelible wandering worldliness—there is a stable center of love inside him, necessary in a world that is inherently unstable. He is the kind of writer who sees just as clearly and calmly under siege as when driving in Virginia. His literature is equally at home, or equally not at home, in any and all places.

Though My Heart is autobiographical in the sense that the person in the book is the person who wrote it, nothing about it is memoiristic or confessional, and certainly never indulgent or self-centered. Experience is refracted in the world, just as the world is refracted in the experience, while the writing is not descriptive but defamiliarizingly reflective and transformative. Mehmedinović generates knowledge—about love, life, death, family, exile, displacement, past, memory—that is not available otherwise, but his need to do so is both personal (if I don’t remember, who will?) and ethical (if I don’t remember, no one will). “We spend a lot of time remembering the past,” he writes in “Snowflake,” “that’s how we check how much of everything we’ve forgotten.”

MY HEART

Me’med

ME’MED

Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.

I was getting ready for work, taking a shower, when I felt a dull, metallic pain in my chest and throat, and the taste of cement on my tongue. I stepped out of the shower feeling indescribably tired and wrapped my wet body in a bathrobe. Sanja was just about to leave the apartment to go to work, but then she caught sight of me through the open bathroom door. I told her I wasn’t feeling well, I was going back to bed for a bit, this weariness would soon pass, and she shouldn’t hesitate to go.