Nowhere Man is published as a novel, yet the seven stories comprising it do not necessarily create the coherent whole we have grown accustomed to call “a novel.” But the book’s epigraph, a quote from The Age of Genius by Bruno Schulz, might give us a clue to the novel’s structure and inner logic, that is, to the author’s vision of space and time. If narratives are by their nature built upon the continuity and successiveness of events, what happens, Schulz asks, “with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, decided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, errant and homeless?” “Passover,” the first story in the novel, takes place in Chicago on April 18, 1994; “Yesterday” happens in Sarajevo between September 10, 1967, and January 24, 1992, and it describes Pronek’s life in his home country from birth up to the last day before his departure to the States. As in the presumably mythicized version of Aleksandar Hemon’s autobiography in “Exchange of Pleasant Words” from The Question of Bruno, Pronek’s family is Bosnian Ukrainian. When he goes for the first time to Ukraine, he meets a woman “he would one day visit in Chicago”—a visit described in “Blind Josef and Dead Souls” where we find out that he arrives in the States on January 26, 1992 (The Question of Bruno). The coherence between, and precise matching of the important dates in the characters’ lives is uncanny given the fact that we are dealing here with two different books. Is it possible that the arrangement of the stories in these two books was done by Hemon in a different way than what his editors ultimately decided, and “Blind Josef Pronek” was initially part of “The Pronek Fantasies”? Or is this shuffling of stories deliberate—as the quote from Schulz suggests? If the latter is true, the mastery of such complex structures as that of Hemon’s books is extraordinary. The technique in which a story from one book complements another book’s events and characters, thus giving the illusion of a three-dimensional reality, was invented by Balzac in the Comédie Humaine in the desire to compete with reality itself and to create a self-sufficient fictional universe. Hemon has more modest and more modern aspirations, as his desire for the whole is paralleled by a desire for the interrupted and the fragmented. His Sebald-like technique of mixing artifacts (photos, some of which are of “real” people) with the fabric of the story has the effect of blurring the line between the real and the fictional, and the fiction acquires what Roland Barthes called “the effect of the real” (i.e., a lifelike feeling).“Fatherland” takes us to Ukraine in 1991, where the narrator, an American of Ukrainian origin meets Pronek, a Bosnian also of Ukrainian origin. “Translated by Josef Pronek” takes place in Sarajevo in December 1995—a sober and minimalist rendering of war violence, sparing us the exotic spice some authors feel obligated to add when writing about wars. The last piece, “Nowhere Man,” a hilarious parody of spy stories, spans over a hundred years, from 1900 in Kiev to 2000 in Shanghai. Here, Pronek appears episodically as one of the names of the Spy known as Captain Pick. “Nowhere Man,” which gives the novel its title, is emblematic of the structure of the entire book. This is not a return to Pronek’s roots, since the Pronek in this story was born in September 1900 in Kiev, while the Pronek in “Yesterday” and presumably all the other stories was born in Sarajevo on September 10, 1967. The two Proneks are two different incarnations at different times and places of the idea of Pronek, of Pronek as a possibility. Moreover, one of the men in Pronek’s circle in Shanghai is Alex Hemon, “a former member of the Purple Gang in Detroit, a hit man who has to kill somebody every time he gets drunk.” Pronek is also the man who turns in to the police Sorge from “The Sorge Spy Ring” (The Question of Bruno). Both Hemon and Sorge are mentioned only in passing, as if they were familiar members of a family the reader is acquainted with. (Incidentally, Sorge also reappears in the last story of The Question of Bruno, “Imitation of Life.”) It is, of course, possible that Josef Pronek from “Nowhere Man” is the father of Josef Pronek from “Yesterday” since they are both of Ukrainian origin. It is up to the reader to fill in the blanks, since the author only gives us apparently disconnected stories in which the characters cross paths and reemerge under new incarnations. What distinguishes Hemon from other writers is not that his books break with the linear structure of storytelling—there is nothing new about that, as numerous contemporary American films and novels do it; but in doing so, these movies and books tend to follow a predictable pattern: they either start with the end of the story and then go back until the last scene/page is the same as the one at the beginning; or else the story moves back and forth in time between the moment of storytelling and the past when the events occurred. Hemon, on the other hand, builds parallel universes whose characters intersect. The main character from one story makes a brief appearance in another story, thus creating a common universe stitching together the stories that exist out there as broken fragments. It is a paradoxical desire for a total world— paradoxical because Hemon has been described as a “postmodern writer,” and if “postmodern” means anything, the desire for any kind of totality is its very opposite.Since any creation is ultimately about recreating space and time, a writer’s essence resides in his vision of space and time. From this point of view, Hemon realizes the incredible performance of reconciling Balzac and Schulz. In this, he is entirely postmodern, a writer of multiple origins, a “nowhere man” who may be one of the world’s greatest writers.
As a stylist, Hemon is first-rate. He brings an linguistic outsider's sense of play to his use of language, and his ideas and images pop and crackle on the page. This is an example of why the Sarajevo-born Hemon is being hailed as Chicago's exciting, young literary voice. The book centers on the character of Pronek, a Bosnian immigrant in Chicago. The book seeks to examine the idea of identity, not just in terms of the emigre experience, but as it is constructed in the minds of other people. We are ourselves, existant in reality, but we also exist as constructs in the minds of others.This book was often great, at times frustrating. I didn't care for the section told in the voice of the American academic who rooms with Pronek on a trip in Ukraine; he seemed like a creepy stalker. I was also a little disconcerted by the sudden shift away from the book's first narrator. Hemon spends a good deal of time structuring the world from the narrator's perspective, then abruptly leaves him. As a reader, I felt like one of those cartoon characters that suddenly realizes he's walking on thin air beyond a cliff edge. The later parts of the book were the best, maybe approaching genius. Pronek works for Greenpeace, tries to become a private detective, gets a girlfriend and tears up her apartment. These sections are almost like James Joyce's short stories in Dubliners, in that they seem traditionally structured but are also very open-ended moments captured in time. The later parts of Hemon's book are more conventional in their structure, but I think that experimental writing is more interesting when it is in tension with conventional forms.Sometimes, I thought the book would collapse under its own weight (especially in its first half), but then Hemon would turn a phrase or switch perspectives, and things would take off again. All in all, Hemon is brilliant.
What do You think about Nowhere Man (2009)?
Nowhere Man is the story of Josef Pronek, currently stuck in America as his home country of Bosnia is torn apart by war. It's a coming of age story which mixes the threat of war and regime change with the adaptation to a more benign culture. It's a story that could easily be all doom and gloom, but Hemon mixes the heavy with the sublimely absurd seamlessly, and has a light and easy touch to he writing which belies the darker matter underneath. We hear of Josef's teenage years, spent in a Beatles Covers band, through a summer camp in the Ukraine during a military coup, and the escape to the New World, where after a brief stint translating for a debt collector, Josef finally falls in love with a Sonic Youth fan that makes him realise "Yesterday" was always a bit of a rubbish song after all. But the pop culture and the humour mask the fact that Josef struggles to make sense of his origins and his new life, in contrast to that of his old country. As he's found of saying himself, "it's complicated." Really enjoyed the book.
—Becky
Yes, I liked this book, but the real reason I'm giving it high marks is that it confirmed my suspicion (based on various short stories of Hemon's that I've come across) that Aleksandar Hemon is a Real Neat Guy and made me want to read his other stuff, which, I suspect, will be better than this book. Hemon emigrated from Bosnia to Chicago at age 28, and I have a feeling that he wrote the vignettes (or short stories, or whatever) in this book before he fully mastered the English language... his skills are definitely impressive, but it seemed to me that some of his strange word choices might not have been deliberate. Also, the last chapter kind of gives you a hint of what Hemon is capable of when he drops the immigrant-from-Bosnia fictionalized memoir angle and starts to make shit up, and I'm really excited to see more of that. But even if this is as good as it gets, I like. (But PS, critics everywhere - just because someone uses phrases like "cup of limpid tea", it does not mean they write just like Nabokov!)
—Karen
"The Nowhere Man" is a book about the adventures of Josef Pronek, an alter-ego of the author as it seems to me.My first impressions when reading the book were that the writing has a certain tone and flow to it - the epic parts may be humorous and quick in action while the descriptive side may be filled with observations, reflections or actions which give the novel a melancholic or humorous note as the case may be.There is at times an imagery that is close to poetic and through which as I said melancholy transpires; Pronek is a displaced man as he came to the US from Bosnia - thus he is somewhat exotic and his accent, speech or other characteristics give him away.He is also universal as it is a story about growing up, growing old and adjusting to change. In the text, each chapter is narrated by various friends or acquaintances of Pronek which have interacted with him: his friend from Sarajevo which meets Pronek when he was talking English lessons, another one which tells about the rock and blues singing days when Pronek dreamed about being as big as Beatles and then of signing blues, about the days spent in Kiev in a summer camp at the time when the Soviet Union was collapsing, about the times spent as a detective and as a Greenpeace activist. For some of these friends, Pronek can be perceived as quite charismatic and influential (although without him being aware of this), a young rocker growing up or a man trying to live in a new country, culture and habbits.I liked the sharp sense of observation and the way in which apparently banal situations are given a twist and may take you back to sometime in the past in the native country of Pronek or just describe something that can be a unusual when looked from a different angle.I found the final chapter quite odd, was baffled by it and still have to clear out what to think of it.overall, an interesting book and writing style.
—Bogdan-Alexandru
