Nowhere Man (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside..." (more)
Key Phrases: Captain Pick, Jozef Pronek, Father Petrol (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Following his critically acclaimed short story collection, The Question of Bruno, Aleksandar Hemon's debut novel Nowhere Man confirms that an important new voice has arrived. Unlike other Eastern European coming-of-age novels, Nowhere Man bucks chronological order, spanning the 1990s and sometimes reading like a memoir. Jozef Pronek, who grew up dreaming of hitting it big with his Beatles cover band, wanders through his adopted Chicago while the Bosnia conflict rages on, working as a process server and for Greenpeace, where he meets his girlfriend, Rachel. Jozef spends time in Kiev with American graduate students, such as the uncannily depicted Will, "blonde and suburbanly ... [as if his] family procreated by fission," and Vivian, "pale and in need of a carrot or something." He rooms with Victor Plavchuk, a conflicted doctoral student in literature who develops a crush on Jozef (and who is reminiscent of a subdued Charles Kinbote from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire). Jozef is sublimely complex, embodying the listlessness and frank practicality of expatriates whose homeland is being shredded by violent conflict. Jozef wonders, "Why couldn't he be more than one person? Why was he stuck in the middle of himself, hungry and tired?" while a woman "[keeps] her hands in the pockets of her formerly blue jacket, as if despair were a marble in her pocket." Hemon's wit is also present: "The only thing that distinguished Pronek in school was that he never, ever volunteered to do anything." Nowhere Man is a somber, saddening, yet vibrant and warm debut novel. --Michael Ferch --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Jozef Pronek, the quirky Sarajevan who captured the imagination of readers in Hemon's acclaimed story collection (The Question of Bruno), gets full-length treatment in this acutely self-aware and tender first novel. Hemon plunges into the inner world of the observant Pronek, making ordinary events seem extraordinary through the sheer power of his detailed descriptions as his protagonist navigates the war-torn land that was once Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia and the wilds of Chicago in the 1990s. Death is a constant companion for Pronek, as is a mysterious man who shadows him wherever he goes, and their lockstep journey is at the heart of a book that wanders back and forth through time and space. Hemon is stingingly accurate in his portrayal of the small, pivotal moments of youth: Pronek resorting to sliced onions to make himself cry at his grandmother's funeral, his first bungling effort at sex, his noisy rock band and his humiliating stint as a soldier. When Pronek goes to Kiev to visit his grandfather, Hemon effectively spells out his need to make sense of his life and his frustrated nationalism, his love for a country that seems to no longer love itself. The weight of such reflections are counterbalanced by zany scenes like Pronek's encounter with President G.H.W. Bush at a ceremony on the site of the Babi Yar massacre. As a "nowhere man," Pronek travels to Chicago, where he is out of step with the alienated youth culture, a person with a dubious identity and past that is not fully explained until the final chapter. Pronek's constantly reconfiguring life makes the novel a wild, twisty read, and Hemon's inimitable voice and the wry urgency of his storytelling should cement his reputation as a talented young writer.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375727027
• ISBN-13: 978-0375727023
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #305,188 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans?", September 21, 2002

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies (Hardcover)

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

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Highest Praise I Can Muster, December 29, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exposing psychological insecurity , April 5, 2007

By	Gantuya. B "Muur" (Mongolia) - See all my reviews

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.