Nowhere Man

I really wanted to hate Nowhere Man.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First off it’s quite a lot more fun to write incredibly bitchy and vicious things than it is to sing the praises of something, secondly there’s an author’s photo on the inside cover of the book and Aleksandar Hemon looks a lot like G.O.B. from Arrested Development.  It might be the Norfolk Libraries sticker covering half his face, but there’s something about his dark intensity that just screams, “It’s an illusion.”  I really wish I could show it to you.  But, alas, I cannot.  And, Nowhere Man is actually a pretty decent read.

It’s the story of Josef Pronek, only it’s not.  Unlike The Years, it is actually a pretty coherent tale by the end.  It just takes a while to get there.  By this, I simply mean there are multiple narrators (the odd first person some third person omnipotence) and a non-linear narrative structure.  One narrator details Pronek’s life until he leaves for America, explicitly excepting the time Pronek spends in Ukraine, the next comes along and fills the gaps.  This holds true until the final chapter, which is more concerned with the life of a Captain Evgenij Pick, a Russian warmonger living in Shanghai who once used the name Josef Pronek as an alias.  A quick Google brings up an archived Wikipedia page suggesting Hemon based this character on a real person, but it’s impossible to tell.  The story seems too incredible to be fictional and the chapter is so disjointed from the rest of the book that I’m still not sure why it’s there.  The book is linked to others written by Hemon, but I somehow doubt that would clear the matter up. 

The novel’s also shockingly un-political.  I have no knowledge of the political events affecting Sarajevo in the early nineties.  Being more interested at the time in bright colours and learning to talk than Eastern bloc coups, I never really caught up.  But, reading the blurb for the book, I expected a story of a young man displaced by war and full of angst to return home.  And that’s not at all what this is.  The political events are only obliquely referenced: headlines in newspapers, characters asking Pronek about “back home,” an evacuation from Ukraine more motivated by a dying father than political unrest.  If the surface of the novel is to be believed, Pronek is a character who is not involved in the political ramifications.  He cannot return to Sarajevo, but he’s perfectly happy where he is.  There are only hints at anything deeper.  Pronek may be shockingly unsentimental when it comes to his family, but becomes nostalgic for traditional Bosnian music.  Never mind that he was brought up on The Beatles.

The thing about this book is it’s good.  In some parts it’s great.  I enjoyed it.  I don’t actually have that much negative to say about it.  Except, it’s one of the books that I’ve come across on the list which I’m not sure belong.  Sometimes it’s difficult to see why a particular book has made the cut and this is one of those cases.  I’m not sorry I read it, I just didn’t find it excellent and there must be more than 1,001 truly excellent books knocking around out there.

The next book up is Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.  I adored Mr. Vertigo and The Book of Illusions, so my hopes couldn’t be higher.  I may need to prepare for disappointment.