Something very, very strange—odd, even—is going on with Aleksander Hemon’s collection of short stories, Love and Obstacles. It shows up in reviews, in analysis, academic papers, and just plain old discussion threads. What is the name of the narrator of these stories which all share the same first-person narrator? Most people will answer that question with “unknown.” The narrator is unidentified.
That is not the only answer that one will find out there in the ether. Some will insist that the narrator is named Bogdan. And, indeed, there is a character named Bogdan in book. But he is identified by the narrator: “I gathered that Bogdan was much like me, an oddity: a Ukrainian from Bosnia, although, unlike me, he was not from Sarajevo.”
There is still yet a third party to this strangeness. Those that do not consider Bogdan to be narrator himself nor the third party he is described as, but a kind of Tyler Durden-esque doppelganger who exists in the mind of the narrator as a separate individual, but is really just an unconscious projection of himself personified into existence as a character that is but a figment of imagination.
Now comes the weird part. Aside from some very ambiguous statements from the narrator concerning the similarity between himself and Bogdan—supposedly planted clues with only slightly more credibility than the accusations of rigged voting machines in the 2020 election—nothing in these stories indicate a purposeful intent to create the confusion about the nature of the relationship between Bogdan and the narrator as a key element to the novel. Oh, sure, the stories do pursue a theme of identity, but the Bogdan situation is only one minor aspect of that thematic element. Of greater interest, perhaps, is the story in which the narrator mentions having published a short story in the New Yorker titled “Love and Obstacles” which completely obliterates the already fuzzy border connecting the story of the narrator with the life of the author.
What is spectacularly strange about the reaction to this book is the dedication to the various viewpoints regarding the identity of the narrator. Those who accept that he is Bogdan go in all the way. Reviewers who take on this perspective identify the narrator of every story as Bogdan whether the character appears by name as a separate person or not. Those who insist that the narrator and Bogdan are completely separate individuals often do not even mention the name Bogdan or comment on the stories in which he appears.
The important thing to take away here is that one should read the story and make the determination alone about who is the narrator, who is Bogdan and what is the relationship. Otherwise, reading one review with the line “all but one feature a Hemon-like narrator named Bogdan” while the next review insists that “the unnamed narrator who appears in each of these eight stories is clearly another version of Hemon” can throw a huge monkey wrench into way in which the stories are interpreted.
