Author: Aleksandar Hemon
Year: 2002
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Rating:
Original Rating:
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Genres/categories:
Fiction, Award winners, Short Stories
Culture: Ukraine
Purchase/reserch links:
ISBNs:
9780330393508
9780375727023
0330393502
0375727027 |
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The mind- and language-bending adventures of Hemon's endearing protagonist Jozef Pronek.
From a Goodreads review:
Nowhere Man is one of the very best English language books of the decade. It is a triumph of innovative and meaningful story-telling and a masterpiece of word-craft. Aleksandar Hemon is perhaps the first and only writer able to absorb a strong affinity with Nabokov without being drowned like Narcissus in the beauty of his own writing. Yes, Hemon writes beautifully, which means that he constantly surprises, delights, and disorients the reader, makes the reader marvel and look with fresh eyes on the world. But he also has an urgent story to tell, albeit in his own fiercely original way.
The protagonist of Nowhere Man is Jozef Pronek, a bright, lonely, war-scarred and cynically nostalgic refugee from the 1990's Balkan War who has come to live in Chicago. Pronek is the center and crux of the novel, but his story is delivered from points outside of center, via shifting and vaguely ghostly views of his life. The roaming narration brings certain works of David Mitchell to mind, (it took me a few dozen pages to realize that Pronek and the first narrator were not one in the same... but then after digesting the book's finale, it seems that perhaps they are) and yet the point-of-view never strays far from the intense unfolding of Pronek's young life-- his raging hormones, two-bit rock bands, hilarious adolescent embarassments, and the strange but powerful impression he makes on others as he grows into an adult and moves to the USA. In a certain sense his life will be perfectly and uncannily recognizable to the vast majority of readers, but then it will also be beyond the immediate experience of that same group. Most of "us" have not lived through war and left family and best friends behind. Still, Pronek is never defined by his experience of the Balkan conflict (rendered in horrific three-dimensions in certain passages) he is just himself, warm and witty and-- especially at the end-- far from perfect.
There is no plot to Nowhere Man. Clearly some readers will be soured by Hemon's thorough disinterest in straightfoward storyline. There is just one life to relate. Hemon's absolutely original creation (aligned with but never subservient to V.N., Below, Kundera, Fitzgerald, Murakami, and John Kennedy Toole) delivers that life as a thrilling work of art.
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