The Immigrant Song
A scene takes place in the first story of this collection in which the narrator details his visit to the apartment of a friend named Spinelli plays Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song” as he hollers along with the number’s famous incomprehensible scream. The response by the narrator is to put his hands over his ears to “exaggerate my suffering.” What is notable is that in this particular instance, it is Spinelli who is the immigrant living in Africa while the Bosnian narrator is there to visit his family. The stories all feature the same narrator and are arranged chronologically to tell the story of his coming to America to become the immigrant among the natives.
Spinelli remains something a mystery for the narrator despite his decision to self-exile from homeland and becomes the prototype for the mystery of all Americans and the country itself once arrives here. The stories taken together become a kind of immigrant song itself, filled with riffs, bridges, choruses and individual sounds somehow all coming together to make a complete picture despite overwhelming odds of success.
How to Become a Writer
The unnamed narrator bears a remarkably strong resemblance to the author. He is a young Bosnian man who comes to America and pursues his dream of being a writer. Throughout the stories the narrator self-references himself as a writer, but he is hardly alone. For many readers, one of the highlights of the collection is “The Conductor” in which the narrator spends a drunken evening with Dedo, a fellow Bosnian expatriate who now married to an American woman to whom he cries out, “I’m the biggest Bosnia poet alive.” Her profane response is a testament to the fragility of literature’s ability to transcend national and cultural boundaries which is at the heart of the thematic pursuit of the narrator’s pursuit of success as a chronicler of his times.
The Search for Identity
Is the narrator really just the author or is he a fictionalized version of himself? And, if so, has he idealized himself or is the portrait self-deprecatory in execution? The line between the author’s actual life story and the narrative track of the unnamed narrator often blur to the point of being nothing but the vanishing point. Then there is the curious character of Bogdan who is ostensibly another Bosnian immigrant in exile from his homeland, but certain descriptions are ambiguous enough to raise the question of whether Bogdan and the narrator really are two separate people, but just possibly, perhaps, are two sides of a Fight Club-like split splitting of personalities intended to symbolize the duality of the immigrant experience:
“I gathered that Bogdan was much like me, an oddity…Szmura had no interest in internal Bosnian cultural differences and presupposed that there was a deep, essential kinship between us, which is to say that by mocking Bogdan he was making me the target… It was time, I thought, for us to meet. He reminded me so much of myself, as I had been not so long before.”
