From its ponderous title to its inane contents, The World and All That It Holds, by the Bosnian American novelist Aleksandar Hemon, is a novel that manages to be disappointing in every possible way. But to be fair to the author, I have to say this is the type of book that I am predisposed to hate. It is an epic story of love set during a major military conflict, and it is also an adult-takes-care-of-a-poor-child-that-he-finds book. Perhaps, the earned (if torturous) sentiment of the former genre was supposed to cancel the kitschy smarm of the latter, but no dice. Instead what you have here is a drawn-out, tediously plotted work that manages to satisfy all the necessary conditions of a novel without ever seeming like it needed to be one. It felt like reading an extended treatment for a miniseries, and who knows, maybe it would work better as one. As a novel, it’s a failure.
