Nowhere Man Aleksandar Hemon Picador, 256pp, £15.99 ISBN 0330393499

Aleksandar Hemon's first novel, Nowhere Man, examines the duplicity inevitable in being a foreigner. Its hero, Jozef Pronek, appeared in Hemon's well-regarded collection of stories, The Question of Bruno - in which, as Hemon did himself, Pronek fled Sarajevo before war broke out only to arrive in Chicago and watch it on TV. Nowhere Man describes, in a self-consciously limited fashion and with occasional discrepancies, the rest of his life - not so much shaped by war as unshaped by it - and told from the point of view of the people for whom he matters, as a symbol of exile.

The book is subtitled "the Pronek fantasies" and bears out both meanings of that phrase. It is a book about the hero's imagination - the mutinous interjection of dreams into the banality of his new life and various accommodations to America. These include working for a private investigator and serving a subpoena to a fellow countryman; and later canvassing for Greenpeace (while his homeland destroys itself) to save the rainforests.

It is also a book about the fantasies people have about Pronek. An American boy, the son of an unassimilated Yugoslav immigrant, falls in love with Pronek at a youth conference in Kiev; to him Pronek stands for the native response to a world he experiences only at one remove. Another narrator, who lived across the street from Jozef while growing up in Sarajevo, runs into him again at an EFL class in Chicago. They are learning to use the past-perfect, but abuse the construction until it begins to look like some form of the subjunctive. To him, Pronek stands for memories of their happy youth, as he reconstructs his own perfect past.

Hemon's trick is to interrupt a liturgy of ordinary detail with a flash of something more vivid: a sudden insight into the misery of the world; a Walter Mitty-like day dream gone violently wrong. The central image - repeated in some form by every narrator - involves an animal stuck inside a man and trying to get out. Pronek's anxieties reach the point of crisis while he is lying in bed beside his pretty American girlfriend, listening to a mouse scratching in the next room. The rodent suggests the dream in the first lines of the novel - "of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest". The fight with his awakened lover leads to the awful recognition at the heart of the book: "It became clear to him at that moment that he didn't want to be there - the thought spread out before him like a ski slope - and there was nowhere he wanted to be."

Which isn't to say that all of the book is unhappy. "Sarajevo in the Eighties was a beautiful place to be young - I know because I was young then." Hemon is better at writing about Sarajevo than Chicago, unsurprisingly perhaps. There is a great deal of ordinary childhood in Nowhere Man - early friends, first loves, high school rock-bands - described in the confidence that all ordinary good times will be given weight by the extraordinary misery that ended them. Even so, Hemon suffers from a kind of embarrassment: "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 insignificant." True enough, though the trouble really starts when you try turning them into fiction.

This is where the book falls short: the elaborate devices Hemon constructs both to suggest and ultimately undermine the illusion of the story's truth. Part of the problem is that Pronek himself isn't strong enough as a literary character (as opposed to a documentary subject). His story has the virtues of memoir rather than fantasy, but these - a sharp eye for detail and contrast; helpless wisdom - are rewarding enough.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website