Nowhere Man

Rating:
Summary: novel or series of unrelated scenes?
Review: A mishmash well stated is still no more than a well-stated mishmash. Hemon's lyrical quality to his writing is superb. He can wrap more words and images together than most modern-day writers. If you want to read a paragraph or two, you won't find a better writer.

However, a story needs to make sense in order to be a novel. We go through the entire book; and at the end we are introduced to a completely different character, Captain Pick. Pick is a Russian in China who has great bravado as a recalcitrant expatriot who hangs out in the opium dens and has a homosexual affair with Japanese Commander Otani. Then we flash to the future where someone else comes to the same hotel room and finds that significant. The only connection I detect to the rest of the novel is that Pick for a brief period called himself Pronek; so are we to understand from this brief reference that Pick WAS Pronek? Who knows. What a let down.

The structure of the book is also disheveled. We read about Pronek through eyes of one with a sexual identity crisis. It could have been interesting if the story went anywhere with it. We zip back and forth between events and with timelines, blurring how one sections relates to the next rather than illuiminating it.

In the end, "Nowhere Man" comes across as a book by a very talented writer who began writing and stopped when he stopped. Nan A. Talese needs to fire the editor who handled this book. It's like a wonderful dinner that tastes good going down only to leave you with indigestion. Taxi!

Rating:
Summary: Mishmash
Review: A mishmash well stated is still no more than a well-stated mishmash. Hemon's lyrical quality to his writing is superb. He can wrap more words and images together than most modern-day writers. If you want to read a paragraph or two, you won't find a better writer.

However, a story needs to make sense in order to be a novel. We go through the entire book; and at the end we are introduced to a completely different character, Captain Pick. Pick is a Russian in China who has great bravado as a recalcitrant expatriot who hangs out in the opium dens and has a homosexual affair with Japanese Commander Otani. Then we flash to the future where someone else comes to the same hotel room and finds that significant. The only connection I detect to the rest of the novel is that Pick for a brief period called himself Pronek; so are we to understand from this brief reference that Pick WAS Pronek? Who knows. What a let down.

The structure of the book is also disheveled. We read about Pronek through eyes of one with a sexual identity crisis. It could have been interesting if the story went anywhere with it. We zip back and forth between events and with timelines, blurring how one sections relates to the next rather than illuiminating it.

In the end, "Nowhere Man" comes across as a book by a very talented writer who began writing and stopped when he stopped. Nan A. Talese needs to fire the editor who handled this book. It's like a wonderful dinner that tastes good going down only to leave you with indigestion. Taxi!

Rating:
Summary: The Highest Praise I Can Muster
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A good but jerky narrative of a forced exile
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: novel or series of unrelated scenes?
Review: I agree completely with Mr. Armstrong. This book reads like loosely-compiled scenes written by a very talented miniaturist. The writing is clever, full of inventive and humorous observations, but there is no sense of narrative or coherent story. The final scene, a whirlwind summary of the life of the expat Russian con-man Pick, seems only relevant in that Pick could somehow be Pronek's father or grandfather. I imagine Hemon had a bunch of scenes or character studies that weren't quite complete enough to be short stories, so they were all tossed together and called a novel. The excellence of the scenes made the book enjoyably readable, but it was ultimately unsatisfying.

Rating:
Summary: Brave Attempt At a Novel
Review: If Aleksandar Hemon weren't a Serbian writing in English (as his second language) who knows if he'd have ever gotten into print? One thing's for sure--he'd have never been compared to the likes of Nabokov or Conrad--for such comparisons are superficial (relying only on the fact that these great masters wrote in English-as-a-second-language, too.) For, aside from that fatuous connection, Hemon is no master of prose--like the aforementioned authors.
Yes, he's talented and, yes, he has good imagery. As for structure, narrative flow, etc., he's a rank amateur. In fact, "Nowhere Man"--the follow up to his collection of short stories--is not really a novel. It's--like his first book--a collection of short stories pretending to be a novel. It's rather obvious that he just had a bunch of sketches and took out all the names, inserting the name Josef Pronek into each of the re-writes and claiming that it's a cohesive story (when in fact it's not). --Taken as a whole, it's a desultory mess, with narrators coming in and then abruptly disappearing, shifts of perspective, time, etc. --Doubtless, he'll hide behind the post-modernist excuse that "coherence" is a thing of the past. (But let's be honest: One can tell the difference between purposeful a-linear story-telling and short-stories-stitched-together-pretending-to-be-a-novel.)
On another note, his editor needs to be more careful, too: He (or she) occasionally allows lapses in the author's English to slip through. On page 142, for instance, he writes: "Pronek crossed his legs and tigethened his butt muscles, repressing a flatulence". --A flatulence? --One could repress flatulence, or repress a spate of flatulence--but "repressing A flatuelnce?" --It's bad English. On the very next page, he writes: "My wife is a boxing judge. She sits by the rink." --Boxer's fight in a "ring," not a rink. Likewise, later on he writes about a person being an alumni of a college. In fact, a person can only be an alumnus, NOT an "alumni," since "alumni" is the plural.
All of these mistakes should have been caught before the novel went to print. After all the author is relying on his touted mastery of English to save him from deeper scrutiny of his shortcomings as a prose stylist. If his editor allows these slips, what has he left?

Rating:
Summary: "Sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans?"
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: The Best Novel I've read in years
Review: Jozef Pronek, one of the most complex and appealing characters in fiction, introduced in Hemon's 1999 book The Question of Bruno, returns as the protagonist of this brilliant novel. Pronek has a series of adventures, ranging from his youth in pre-war Sarajevo to canvassing for Greenpeace in the Illinois hinterlands. What ties this book together is Pronek's sheer charisma and the fact that Hemon is the best writer of sentences currently at work. His descriptions perfectly crystallize what we've always thought but never been able to express. This is a book of humor, intelligence, and profound humanity and empathy. I can't wait to see what Hemon comes up with next.

Rating:
Summary: Better Than the Beatles
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Best novel I've read in years too
Review: This is a brilliant book. If you like Nabokov, you'll like this too. I didn't understand the last chapter either, but I'm not sure the flaw is the author's.