My Amazon and Goodreads review of My Heart: A Novel by Semezdin Mehmedinovic (Rating 5) – Life’s Irregular Beat and Steady Flow. Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s autobiographical novel My Heart is literally and figuratively about the life-giving organ of its title. Divided into three sections, the book begins with Sem’s heart attack, ends with his wife Sanja’s stroke, and in the middle recounts a long road trip Sem takes with their adult son Harun, whose restless heart pumps with an energy that is dwindling in his aging parents. Threaded through the book is the intense love that beats in the author’s heart for this tight-knit family. My Heart is also about memory. In the first story, the author remembers little of his heart attack. Told the medication he must now take may cause further memory loss, Sem is obsessed with remembering the first place the family lived after emigrating from Bosnia. This prompts the trip from Maryland to Arizona with his son, a photographer who creates, rather than retrieves, memories. Harun’s time-lapse pictures reveal wonders the eye alone cannot see. Sem’s insight on this journey is that while we remember places, they retain no memory of us. Recall, or its lack, is most prominent in the novel’s third section. Sanja’s stroke has obliterated large swaths of her memory. Sem hopes that returning from the hospital to the familiarity of home will restore the missing images and events, but again place is not a repository for memory. Robbed of once-known words and ideas, Sanja, like their son, creates new, often entertaining ones. Finally, the novel is about place itself. An immigrant, Sem is forever an outsider in America. His identity cannot be rooted in a place. Fortunately, the core of his being is the family he carries in his heart. A model for a person who ages well, My Heart is gentle and reflective, but not passive. As a fiber artist and writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admired Mehmedinovic’s ability to interweave multiple themes in a subtle tapestry that will touch the heart of readers who contemplate the irregular beat and steady flow of their own lives.
