Nowhere Man

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.

The writers of the old old New Europe, between The Danube and the Dardenelles, all seem to share a gift for mordant nostalgia expressed in akilter cadences and quirky metaphors. Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kos, Ivo Andric -- writers in Czech, Serbian, whatever pan-Slavic language -- give us their whacky insights in sentences that translate into oddly similar English. With Aleksandr Hemon, a Bosnian immigrant/refugee, we get the same wry sensibilities without translation. Hemon writes in an English that is both perfectly fluent and piquantly foreign: "There was a bench nobody was sitting on, encrusted with blotches. I looked up, and on a steel beam high up above perched a jury of pigeons, cooing peevishly. They bloated and deflated, blinking down on us, effortlessly releasing feces. When I was a kid, I thought that snow came from God sh_tt_ing upon us. The Touhy bus arrived, and we lined up at the bus door. I experienced an intense sneeze of happiness, simply because I had managed not to lose my transfer." Hemon, like the other writers named above, writes very funny prose to tell very sad stories of displacement and loss. In "Nowhere Man", one of his narrators tells about learning songs to sing a late night student parties, in hopes of creating a mood for seductions. The songs are all about "`sevdah' -- a feeling of pleasant soul pain, when you are at peace with your woeful life, which allows you to enjoy this very moment with abandon." Other cultures and other languages have a similar word -- saudade in Portuguese, for instance -- but no other literature is so permeated with "sevdah" as that of the former Eastern European socialist satellites. Josef Prosek, the title character of Nowhere Man, is a Bosnian teenager in love with the melodies of the Beatles and the cacophonies of sex. Prosek comes to America, to Chicago, in 1992, just before the worst of the atrocities in Bosnia, without leaving behind any of the haplessness of being a teenager or an ethnic outsider in his homeland. Any reader would be excused for supposing that Prosek is Aleksandar Hemon's comically honest self-portrayal, but in fact the novel is narrated by a succession of "others" whose voices sound ineluctably alike... Hemon snapshotting himself in various profiles, in the photo booth on the amusement pier? Nowhere Man fits easily in a major genre of American literature, novels of immigration -- a genre I enjoy a lot, sharing many of its core experiences. The themes of the immigration novel tend to replicate across decades and ethnicities, but Hemon makes them freshly amusing... and freshly poignant. The ESL class chapter of Nowhere Man is uproariously funny, and 100% true to life. There are a lot of overlooked `masterpieces' in the genre of immigration; here are some I recommend, from oldest to newest wave of arrival: Giants in the Earth - Ove Rolvaag The Bread Givers - Anzia Yezierska Call It Sleep - Henry Roth Locos - Feelipe Alfau Obasan - Joy Kogawa Typical American - Gish

Bosnian immigrant Jozef does not find his own place in US. He is an intelligent, sensitive and cool guy, but he feels empty inside. The mouse which comes into Jozef's dream in the beginning of novel is similar to Josef himself. Hemon mentions mouse three times in association with Jozef (guy of 1990s) and Russian immigrant (of much earlier time). He tries to expose deep down suffers - psychological insecurities of people (at least these 2 people), who left their countries because of war. Hemon seems wants to tell that, regardless of their intelligence or power, people in such condition always have deep down worries and he compares it with the feelings of mouse who has no place to go and no one to help.

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.

There's a sublime originality to Aleksandar Hemon's first novel that leaves one energized. He can make words leap and twist like acrobats, while creating a character who emerges as the most honest, entertaining and heartbreaking man in recent literature -- if not all literature. I didn't expect Hemon to live up to the promise he demonstrated in THE QUESTION OF BRUNO, but he has, and then some. Hemon is, without question, a writer who will continue to transcend expectations. I cannot wait for his next work.