Book Essay: The Sniper in --A Coin, by Aleksander Hemon (from The Question of Bruno)
There's a moment in Hemon's “A Coin" when consciousness shifts—like a double axis. The sniper, positioned between life and death; a soul hovering in that precarious space between breathing and not-breathing—the transformation of physical geography (the literal movement from point A to point B) into emotional cartography.
The sniper exists in perpetual transit. Every breath marks a journey from one heartbeat to the next, every squeeze of the trigger a decision that propels another being from animation to stillness. When Hemon writes, "The sniper sees everything but is not seen," he speaks of something else— to be noticed, to go unnoticed, to be ignored, and perhaps even how to unsee or see an immigrant vs. Seen an immigrant (Hemon himself is a Bosnian immigrant to America— watching a world he can observe but never fully inhabit.)
Unlike his later writing, the language in this particular story is direct, unflinching, cutting through air with precision. The staccato rhythm of his sentences doesn't just mimic gunfire; it's the sound of fractured consciousness. Short, sharp sentences land like a hail storm pellet. The sentences compress time— expanding and contracting with the sniper's breath.
What moves me most is the character's profound solitude. The sniper—isolated by choice, by profession, by psychological necessity—carries silence like another weapon. His inability to connect mirrors the refugee's dilemma: how to bridge the unbridgeable gap between what was and what is. Between home lost and home found. Between language lost and language found. Hemon, who left Sarajevo for Chicago just as war erupted in Bosnia, knows this territory. The sniper's journey from point A to point B is, ultimately, the impossible journey from belonging to exile.
There's something mesmerizing about how Hemon manipulates time in this story—it breathes like an accordion. Time in "A Coin” alternately compresses into tight, dense moments and then expands into languid, stretched passages.
In the sniper's world, seconds can dilate to contain universes. A single inhalation before the trigger pull becomes a cataclysm of awareness—the moisture in the air, the precise angle of light, the microscopic adjustments of muscle and bone.
And of course Hemon uses language with exquisite attention.
Then, without warning, hours collapse into single sentences. Days vanish in paragraph breaks. The accordion compresses. This isn't capriciousness—it's the authentic rhythm of isolation, from war, from home— of a kind of precariousness, as though day, or rather, time, has lost its balance.
When your life is in danger at any given moment, you do not see or feel like a normal person on the street. It is the feeling and vision of someone in panic.
The sniper exists primarily in these compressed moments—the breath, the focus, the shot. Everything else recedes into fog.
The most haunting aspect is how the accordion metaphor extends to memory itself. The sniper's recall works in precisely this way—moments of perfect, crystalline detail surrounded by vague impressions. The character exists in the immediate physical present of the mission, the psychological present of hyperawareness—where time is symmetrical, geometric, and the ghostly half-presence of fear that neither arrives nor departs.
In the end, the movement from point A to point B reveals itself as the central illusion. The sniper, like Hemon himself, exists in the hyphen between identities—never fully arriving, never completely departing. And within that suspense hides the tragic beauty of the thought that we are all, in our own ways, departing and arriving; walking towards a moving target we can never quite reach.