Nowhere Man [German] [Paperback]

Jozef Pronek, as a teenager in Sarajevo, loves the Beatles, and, not surprisingly, forms a band with other young people, all of whom, like Jozef, have dreams but no prospects, their favorite song being "Nowhere Man." Later, almost by accident, Jozef finds himself living in Chicago, thousands of miles from the Balkan war which is destroying his country, still without prospects. As he and several named and unnamed narrators relate episodes from Jozef's unfocused life throughout the 1990's, the story jumps from Chicago to Sarajevo to Kiev and Shanghai, following no sequential order, and always returning to the controlling idea that "There was a hole in the world, and I fit right into it; if I perished, the hole would just close, like a scar healing..."

Hemon, a Sarajevo native who didn't begin writing in English until 1995, achieves immense power by keeping his sentence structure simple, acutely observing the minutiae of Jozef's life, meticulously selecting images which are both visually and emotionally memorable, then firing them at us in a staccato series of flashes. Just before a job interview, for example, Jozef recalls smashing cardboard boxes, a cat eating the head of a mouse, the Bosnian war as seen on TV, and a passing driver pointing a finger at him and pretending to shoot. Boiling eggs are seen as "iris-less eyes," and he has "butterflies in [his] stomach, ripping off one another's wings." With irony and dark humor, he recalls a woman calling out to her lost dog, "Lucky Boy," while a young ESL teacher addresses her class as "you guys" and conducts lessons about Siamese twins.

Jozef is a character with whom most readers will empathize, and as we view his life at home and abroad, we root for his success at the same time that we fear his failure. "The possibility that the world can never respond to [Jozef's] desires torture[s] him." Because separating Jozef from all his fantasies is not always easy, some readers may still be wondering at the end of the novel, "Who is Jozef Pronek, really?" however, and his world, in which an "omniscient, omnipotent, but not necessarily benevolent being" is in control, will not appeal to everyone. For those who love language used in fresh ways, however, this novel offers innumerable delights and great satisfaction. Mary Whipple

Aleksandar Hemon writes in marvelous ways about a world that most writers seem not to notice -- the real world, or at least the world I live in. Hemon's real world is an urban world full of genuinely human people and tangible history. Hemon's first book took place in this world, too, and I love him for it, but Nowhere Man is a much more sophisticated, textured, and affecting book than The Question of Bruno, and it establishes that Hemon is more than up to the writer's great challenge: to create a character that will live on and on, like Bellow's Augie March, Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Chandler's Marlowe, etc. And Jozef Pronek will live on as one of the great literary protagonists of the 21st century, but he will not live on as a flat icon, but as a seemingly real person, who I've already known as a child, as a student, as a detective, as a wage-slave, as a lover.
Sometimes in The Question of Bruno, maybe Hemon was showing off a little, to dazzling effect but more for the sake of doing it than for the sake of the book itself. That doesn't happen in Nowhere Man, probably because it's all about the lovable Pronek, in the way that Catcher in the Rye is all about keeping you involved with Holden Caulfield. That's a strange comparison and probably wildly inaccurate -- Pronek doesn't feel like a kid at all (he's too world-wise and weary for his own good), and it's so absurd to describe this book as a coming-of-age story it didn't even occur to me until right now (a more accurate comparison might be to Toru Okada of Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, who's supposedly all grown-up by the time we meet him) -- but in some ways I felt about Pronek the way I felt about Caulfield. Not that I necessarily 100% identified with him, but that I felt for him, intensely, was eager to look at the world through his eyes, happy to live in the world with him. I think it's that intellectual and emotional empathy that make Catcher still stand up as an enduring piece of literature, and it's the same thing that will make Nowhere Man stand up forever and ever.
Seems to me the only contemporary writers worth comparing Hemon too are Ondaatje and Sebald (and Murakami I guess), and one of those guys is already gone. I mean that as the highest praise, and it's not to say he feels like an old writer. Quite the opposite -- he just seems to be one of very, very few young writers up to inheriting their mantle, capable of making something new and wonderful out of literature in the 21st century, something that can address and inhabit what our world's becoming.

Yes, Nowhere Man is seriously flawed. As other reviewers have noted, it is indeed poorly edited, often confusing, and its naive, self-conscious attempt to be literary and postmodern caused me to wince with discomfort. His over-use of similes was maddening, etc.

However, this novel is so replete with brilliant observations ("crackling with acuity"), expressed in stunningly novel and creative ways that I found it compulsively readable; in fact, for pure pleasure, this is the best read I've experienced in years. If I were a collector of literary 1st editions, I would be buying up Hemon's oeuvre, for his works--despite their deficiencies--are destined to be among the few that survive our times.