When Aleksandar Hemon, a Sarajevo journalist and occasional writer of fiction and poetry in his late 20s, moved to Chicago in 1992, he only had a functional, Lonely Planet-grasp of the English language. Which is why reading his latest novel, The Making of Zombie Wars , feels as though irony has completed a flawless headstand. The protagonist Joshua Liven, a perennially procrastinating screenplay writer, has a day job teaching English to immigrants. Joshua Liven — or Josh, as he is generally referred to in the novel — is what Billie Joe Armstrong really, really doesn’t want to be: an American idiot, albeit a benign one. He belongs to truly rarefied slacker territory. His idea of a dream screenplay is the 138th rehash of a Hollywood zombie apocalypse. He is unappreciative of his well-adjusted and super-successful girlfriend, the only person who stays by his side despite his lackadaisical attitude (In fact, the only time he is anything other than lukewarm towards her is when he discovers a cock ring among her possessions). He’d take a well-travelled penis over a well-nourished heart any day of the week. In the story that he is writing, his fictional alter-ego Major Klopstock is waging war on the undead. But in reality, Liven runs from the first sign of conflict, let alone full-blown war, like Hemon did: the Bosnian war of 1992-95. BL ink caught up with the author at the Jaipur Literature Festival last month, and he explained how people (and not just writers) use fictional techniques to make sense of their war experiences.

“We’re all assuming that life and the world and everything there is will go on as it is now — an assumption of continuity,” Hemon said. “We operate and make plans assuming that this is how it’s going to be tomorrow (...) That’s pretty much a complete delusion, but if we didn’t do it, we would go crazy. This is the way we had to deal with war, to conceptualise it, to impose some sort of continuity of history, of time and so on.”

In Hemon’s 2000 collection The Question of Bruno , the protagonist of the story ‘A Coin’ writes letters at wartime, diligently inscribing and posting each of them, even when there is no way of knowing whether any letters are being delivered. The tone of the letters gets more and more comforting, as though she fears the worst as far as the recipient is concerned. However, as the story progresses, it is clear that the letters are comforting her more than anybody.

Hemon explained it thus: “Well, there’s a constant struggle. You can think of any kind of trauma as a kind of rupture, a kind of before and after. And the change is irreversible: you can never get back to the before, much like Gregor Samsa cannot become as he was, once he wakes up as an insect. (…) One of the ways that people move on from the trauma is to mythologise the past.”

Each of Hemon’s books has been funnier than the last one, but somehow, they have also gotten proportionately sadder. His most famous work, the novel The Lazarus Project , has two Bosnian-Americans travelling to Bosnia in search of the Averbuch family. In 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jewish immigrant in Chicago, was mistaken for an anarchist and shot dead by George Shippy, the city’s chief of police. The narrator, a writer called Brik, has been awarded a grant to write Averbuch’s story. The book flits constantly between two narrators: Brik and Olga Averbuch, Lazarus’s elder sister and our guide to a time when paranoia, anti-Semitism and xenophobia were beginning to poison the world, pushing it to the edge of World War I.

In a way, the prototype for this style of doppelgänger narratives was introduced in ‘The Sorge Spy Ring’, a story from The Question of Bruno , where a young boy, obsessed with spies, re-imagines his father’s frequent absences as proof of a career in espionage (Richard Sorge was a real-life Soviet spy executed by Japan in 1944). The way this story has been laid out on the page is highly distinctive: the main narrative is followed by a parallel historical track about Sorge at the bottom of the pages. Seven years after The Question of Bruno was released, JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year would feature an identical layout. When asked about the story’s unique structure, Hemon had this to say: “One of the illusions that come with leading a stable life is that history is ‘over there’ somewhere. So the wars are fought somewhere else, man keeps going forward slowly and steadily and there’s this strict segregation between history and life. I wanted to point towards that by having another story that unfolds chronologically as experienced by a boy, and has a kind of unity of time and space. And I wanted to footnote that with history (not direct history; that would be too simple), history that’s remote from the experience of the boy and then see how the two narratives elucidate each other.”

That, in a way, sums up Hemon’s entire approach to fiction, a dazzling technique that has blended fact and fiction to produce some of the most convincing black comedies of the last two decades. And if his last book is anything to go by, he’s only just warming up to America, the land where black comedy ought to be called just ‘comedy’.

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