Customer Reviews

Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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

Alexsandar Hemon's is the kind of story that would in itself make for a great telling. Born a Serbian, he came to the US as part of a journalistic goodwill mission and stayed behind when his land broke into war. He learnt English soon thereafter and in a few years, wrote the superlative "The Question of Bruno"-a compilation of short stories that earned him high praise in every literary circuit imaginable.

Jozef Pronek from "Bruno", is the "Nowhere Man" of the book's title and his chronicles as a displaced world citizen are told at various points, through the lenses of people who know him. We learn that Pronek had a pretty unremarkable childhood shielded in part by a stern and watchful grandmother. His teenage years are nothing very specatacular either, spent in most part belting out Beatles tunes (Nowhere Man, get it?!) as part of a band called Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls. Pronek also ventures to Ukraine as a graduate student to learn more about his father's ancestry. This part of the narrative is described by an American fellow graduate student, Victor Plavchuck. Victor harbors a secret crush on Pronek, somebody who, in his words, "had the ability to respond and speak to the world." At the end, we find Jozef Pronek trying to fit into Midwestern suburbia, making a living as a Greenpeace canvasser.

Like his earlier book, Nowhere Man is a great vehicle that showcases Hemon's wonderful use of language. One description particularly rings in my mind: "I piled different sorts of blebby pierogi and a cup of limpid tea on my tray." Blebby? I looked it up. Blebby: "A small blister or sometimes a small particle", a description that would work perfectly for pierogi!

Despite the brilliant use of language, Hemon's narrative moves too much out of focus back and forth and sometimes leaves large gaps in between. Hemon tries to explain this in the novel by saying, "The hard part in writing a narrative of someone's life is choosing from the abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignifincant." That may be so but the story (inlcuding the bizarre last chapter) leaves too much unsaid. The narrative is well, blebby!

The greatest strength of Nowhere Man is Hemon's ability to describe the restlessness that comes from forced exile. To that end, the Greenpeace chapter set in Chicago is my favorite. Pronek simply exists and the routine everydayness of his life is enough to drive him crazy. He is desperately searching out a place in a new role and a new life. When asked if he is a Serb or a Muslim, Pronek simply replies, "I am complicated."

In Chicago, Pronek and his girlfriend once try to kill a small mouse. The tiny animal just never quits. Finally Pronek puts it in a small pail of water and he notices that "the mouse was scratching the walls with its claws, trying to climb up, but it was clearly hopeless." That mouse in Hemon's hands, could well be Jozef Pronek--a displaced animal desperately trying to make his way out. Not succeeding, but not entirely failing either.

I agree that this is an enjoyable page turner but not cohesive as a novel.

That aside, the third section is a great portrayal of life inside a Communist society. The account of Pronek's adolescent adds to my understanding about life in Tito's Yugoslavia. What a surprise, life in a communist country, especially Yugoslavia, was neither horrible, nor wonderful. Hemon's anecdotes are the antidote to anti-Communist hysteria present even today in America.

Hemon has received wide praise. He may be the genius people say he is. I certainly hope so for his sake and for ours. Judging from this novel, I'd say he has a lot of talent. The author clearly has a gift for descriptive writing; he is a witty observer of the "insect" in us all, that is, he is a close observer of the individual as he goes about his daily business. Hemon is observant of things that make one happy to share his vision. He trains one's eyes on the tiniest details and makes one smile to see things from a new perspective. The author is happy to be alive and makes the reader share his enthusiasm for the trivially absurd. All of this is for the good. Beyond this wonderful talent, one wonders what other tricks Hemon has up his sleeves. Can he make us feel deeply? Does one care about his characters? Hemon as nowhere man, the immigrant in the new world, is a ripe topic. He is clearly the right man in the right place to say something deep and lasting about being uprooted in modern society. This piece has much to recommend it but I don't see it as his "Ulysses." Perhaps he is saving that for another time and place.

Intertwined lives, identity crisises, coincidence, fear, longing, isolation, confusion--not to mention wonder, amazement, rebirth as well as the liberation and ecstasy (and sometimes illusion) of epiphany. These are what fill out the lives of the characters in Aleksandar Hemon's second novel Nowhere Man. These traits have also unmistakably been associated with the American refugee experience in fiction.

Hemon is a refugee from the former Yugoslavia and a superlative writer whose power to combine words into image-invoking sentences is unmatched given the fact that he came to the United States in 1992 and didn't start writing in English until 1995. Despite having a fluent grasp of the language, he occasioanlly inserts words in his prose that seem like an imperfect fit. These slips usually come across as inventiveness, however, and add authenticity to his status as a refugee writer and non-native English speaker.

It is appropriate that a writer should come along and tell the contemporary story of the American refugee from the war torn regions of the former Yugoslavia, even as these refugees' impact on the American demographic topography has yet to be fully measured. This novel will refresh readers' memories of the fact that we are a nation of immigrants and that the American immigrant story didn't end at the turn of the Century. It will be interesting to see how history writes the story of the exodus of denizens of the former Yugoslavia from their homeland. Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man is a meritorious first chapter to that saga.