Nowhere Man (Vintage International)

Here's one of my everything-is-connected, one book leads to another kinda intro. I was told of Aleksandar Hemon's work by another writer, Valerie Laken, who praised his short stories, which made me sit up and take notice because her own story collection, SEPARATE KINGDOMS, was simply outstanding. I think she's also from Chicago, which is where Hemon lives now. Anyway, while looking at Hemon's story collections (there are two) I also found this novel, NOWHERE MAN, which immediately intrigued me because the title comes, of course, from the Beatles song and I have been a Beatles fan and follower since 1964. And just in the past year or two I read a couple of other novels that were both inspired by the music of the Beatles. One, originally published in Norwegian over 25 years ago is called simply BEATLES (by Lars Saabye Christensen), and tells of the lives of four young Oslo boys whose lives were influenced by the Liverpool lads - a wonderful picaresque, coming of age kind of novel only translated into English a year or so ago. The other is from Finland, called POPULAR MUSIC FROM VITTULA, and again it's all about some kids who were first enthralled by a 45 rpm Beatles record, "Rock and Roll Music," which they didn't understand but immediately made it their own as they labored to learn how to play musical instruments. Once again, a funny and marvelous book. And the Beatles' music was what started it all. So now here's Aleksandar Hemon with his fictional tale of Bosnian emigrant (not quite a refugee), Jozef Pronek, who does indeed appear to "a real Nowhere Man," caught between cultures as he struggles to make a life for himself in 1990s Chicago. Hemon gives a pretty complete look at Pronek's life, from his childhood in Sarajevo and a comical and sometimes heartbreaking look at Jozef's experiences with girls and women, from his first realization at the age of 10 or 11 that there was a real and mysterious difference between the girls who wore no tops at the beach and those who did not to a final tenuous adult relationship with a young woman he meets while working as a door-to-door canvaser for Greenpeace. Oh yeah, and early on, he and his friend Mirzah become Beatles fans and, like the kids in the Finnish and Norwegian books, take up instruments and learn to play the Fab Four tunes, mostly to get chicks, of course. There is one particularly poignant scene toward the book's end when the adult Jozef reluctantly acknowledges that "Yesterday" was never really anything but an especially sappy song, certainly marking the end of his long-held innocence. This is a richly textured and episodic book which speaks to and of so many important issues both sociological and historical. There are many references to the civil war in Bosnia, of course, and a ground-level and graphic view of how things really were there and in Ukraine in the early 90s as the USSR suddenly flamed out and crumbled, allowing centuries old ethnic hatreds and rivalries to ignite again. Jozef, a peaceful and essentially good-hearted observer, doesn't really understand the hatred between the Christian and Muslim populations that suddenly erupts in those violent and turbulent times. He is perhaps more of a victim and casualty than a participant. Geeze, there is just so much going on in this book, which covers the first nearly thirty years of Pronek's life as well as his family history and ancestry, which, as the final chapter suggests must all be taken with several grains of salt. There are several narrators in NOWHERE MAN. I kinda lost count as I at times wrestled with the constantly shifting point-of-view, trying to establish exactly who was speaking in each chapter or section of the book. Finally I just gave up and went with the flow. I loved the one narrator, Viktor Plavchuk, a grad student in English Lit, who unwillingly falls in love with Jozef, and whose dissertation topic is "Queer Lear." Humor is a constant in the narrative and I found myself smiling, chuckling and laughing throughout the book, at least when I wasn't being horrified by descriptions of the wars. The description of the obligatory year of national military service is especially funny and will ring true to any veteran. The last couple of chapters are perhaps the hardest, due to the quick shifts in times and narrators. Jozef and his Amazing Technicolor Dreams are surreal and disturbing, and in this final 'ancestral history' Hemon revisits many of the names from earlier in the book and recasts them in a broader historical view, even using his own name - "Alex Hemmon, a former member of the Purple Gang in Detroit, a hit man who has to kill someone every time he gets drunk (which he does habitually), and who moonlights as a professional trombonist in an orchestra regularly performing at the Far Eastern Grand Opera." Because I had trouble with the shifting POV's and the last chapter, which seemed almost tacked on, I was tempted to give this book just 4 stars. But then I thought, Nah. Just because I didn't quite get it doesn't negate the sheer genius of the book. This is most definitely a 5-star read, maybe more. I recommend it highly. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER

The author has a masterly command of the english langauge. Ideas expressed are usually very original and sometimes outright funny.

The book is heavily bifurcated, and choppy. The story(s) are told by multiple narrators, over multiple time periods. Each chapter weaves a different thread. I would have rated this book higher had it not been for the author's repertoire of sordid, repugnant, abhorrent, queer dross he had to inject in the novel.

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 Jen The Unknown Errors of Our Lives - Chitra Banerjee Divakarundi The Brief Happy Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz It's obvious that American literature is the real `melting pot' that American society has too-often failed to be. Aleksandar Hemon also fits easily into the amazing succession of writers who have chosen English as their literary medium, rather than being born to it. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov are the greatest of the bunch, and I note that some critical reviewers her on ammy have faulted Hemon for not achieving the same greatness in his first novel. It's waaay premature to make such a comparison; Hemon is not yet a Nabokov. Check back when he's produced a similar body fo work. What's impressive about Hemon, and the other writers in English learned as adults, is the degree to which he's acknowledged the full scope of English -- the immense vocabulary, the rugged range of syntactical variability, the cornucopia of idiomatic quizzicalities -- and melded them into a distinctive language of his own. In fact, he's shown English a good deal more respect than the majority of recent American-born writers. I can't imagine why some reviewers have sniffed and sneered at this book. Even if you can't attest to its profundity, or empathize with the author's sardonic style of coping with heavy pain, how could you not relish the `wild and crazy guy' humor of it? The Bosnians are "onto something," I think, with their SEVDAH. We native-borns could use more of it.

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Blind Josef Pronek and Dead Souls (in The Question of Bruno), è uno dei racconti più poetici, malinconici e disperati che io abbia mai letto. Con Nowhere Man, Hemon torna a parlarci del suo alter ego Pronek. Uno dei racconti più belli narra dell'infanzia di Pronek a Sarajevo, una città che sembra così lontana dalla Milano in cui sono cresciuta io negli anni '70, che nelle parole di Hemon sembra invece così famigliare e conosciuta.