My heart, by Semezdin Mehmedinovic

An elegiac memoir/novel by a Bosnian author.  Mehmedinovic and his wife and son lived through the siege of Sarajevo, escaping to the west in 1996, where they first lived in Phoenix AZ.  The book is in three parts, each a bit sadder, to me anyway, than the one before.  “My heart” details his heart attack at fifty and subsequent return home to his east coast apartment and recovery.  In “Red Bandana,” he and his grown son, Harun, who is a now a photographer still living in Arizona, embark on a five-day road trip around the desert and familiar haunts from their earliest days in the States.  Harun seems most at home in the dry, nighttime desert where he sets up long time-lapse shots of the landscape and moving stars.  It is clear that each of them deals in their own way with the PSTD of their wartime experiences.  The third section is set a few years later when his wife, Sanja, suffers a stroke and makes a long and incomplete recovery.  225 pp.