Alexandar Hemon
Alexander Hemon’s Nowhere Man is about a Sarajevan-born young man, Jozef Pronek, his life in Bosnia and then in Chicago. As the war in Bosnia unfolds and he is safely in the U.S., he tries to regain himself in a new life.
Some of the chapters are narrated by first-person narrators who have different relationships to Jozef, and some are narrated in third-person, focusing on Jozef’s life alone. By the end of the novel you understand that all of these personalities hover around a singular person. In fact, in the first chapter (as occurred to me upon a second reading of the book and also of interviews with Hemon), one Jozef meets another Jozef. Showing Jozef through various eyes allows Hemon to give him an emotional sheen without discussing his feelings; the American Pronek is an observer of himself, not yet a person.
This fragmentation of the American Jozef is a main theme. The narrative of his pre-U.S. life is linear. It’s a heartfelt and smoothly written story of growing up – fighting as a boy, rebellion by starting a Beatles band, a numbing stint in the army. Jozef’s division (or multiplication) beings in Ukraine, where he is meant to be exploring his father’s heritage, as war is breaking out in Sarajevo. His life is narrated in the first person by a roommate, a Chicagoan with a Ukrainian father. (A possible third witness lurks in the hidden camera Josef identifies in their dorm room.) The American is jealous of Jozef’s ability to engage with life, to be happy.
This chapter offers a glimpse into the last days of Jozef’s pre-war nature, which nourishes on self, and the calm ennui of his Soviet existence. Once Jozef arrives in the U.S., the story begins to progress in spurts. Jozef no longer seems to know himself, feels he doesn’t have a place. Sitting on the couch of his first Chicago girlfriend, “… he imagined himself imagining himself in this room, dimly lit, waiting for a woman who could only know what he told her in his sloppy English and distorting accent. He saw clearly that who he thought he was and who she thought he was were two different persons. He imagined himself doubled, the two of them sitting next to each other on the damn sofa.”
In the very end of Nowhere Man, the story of his fragmentation reaches an apogee, even as Jozef himself is beginning to heal. The last chapter is a cauldron of people, events and facts, personified by the twisting life of a wily and cruel Ukrainian, taking place in Asia after the Russian Revolution. Though difficult for me to understand, it reminded me of the hotels in Murakami’s writing (isn’t it convenient that the four books I read a year are all just so similar!?), homes of all the nefarious origins for the events in the heroes’ lives, whether real or imagined, the personal-growing-into-the-political, and others. I really liked this parting of ways between the character, Jozef, and his characterization – even as the former finally begins to engage with his new world, the multitude of disruptive forces playing out within him are on full parade.
Here is the author’s explanation of the structure of Nowhere Man. “This is all dandy peachy, but the reality is that everybody expects my (and yours too) writing to be autobiographical and I had to deal with it in some way. So rather than ignore it, I decided to confuse it — hence the "I" of the third person narrator, who is not Pronek, but is closely related. He either imagines Pronek and the life he might have had, or completely imagines him. The third person narrative had to be ruptured, because the narrator is not disinterested, as he/she can never be truly disinterested. As for me, I think of Pronek as my double (or, better, I think of me as Pronek's double). Our lives are parallel, occasionally intersecting, but not identical. ... And his life is parallel to some other lives — most of the lives, I believe, are parallel, or have similar trajectories. To question the absolute "truth" of the self, I had to double the self, and doubling results in multiplication. It all sounds highfalutin (and probably pretentious), but it's a legitimate writing strategy. I'm interested in the world, past and present, not the souls or the selves. I'm interested in connections not the selfish isolation. I'm interested in human, historical networks, not self-containing, extemporal cells of individuality. [my emphasis] I'm interested in transformative possibilities of fiction, not depiction or description. There's a little manifesto.”
So Hemon’s purpose was to represent the interaction of a person in Jozef Pronek’s shoes and the word. (Gratuitous insert – p. 10 – “… I got off the bus across the street from a Chinese restaurant. New World, it was called, and it was empty, only a sign in the window saying FOR LEASE.”) He multiplies Jozef to avoid getting stuck in his “selfish isolation” or even in his nascent “connections” with the friendly and multicultural Americans of the novel – and this makes for a great and complex piece of writing! But the narrators also seem to show you that a person displaced by war can imagine a too-large variety not only of the places he could travel to, but also of the places he could have come from.
Here is a list of invented names and home countries that Jozef Pronek gives to the people whose homes he canvasses working for Greenpeace. It has the air of aimlessness and wandering, but shot through with displacement not just of the spiritual kind, but of the physical also. “To a young couple in Evanston who sat on their sofa holding hands, Pronek introduced himself as Mirza from Bosnia. To a college girl in La Grance with DE PAW stretching across her bosom he introduced himself as Sergei Katastrofenko from Ukraine… To an old couple from Romania in Homewood, who could speak no English and sat with their hands gently touching their knees, he was John from Liverpool… To a bunch of potbellied Christian bikers barbecuing on a Walgreen’s parking lot in Elk Grove Village, he was Joseph from Snitzlland (the homeland of the snitzl.) To a woman in Hyde Park who opened the door with a gorgeous grin, which then transmogrified into a suspicious smirk as she said, “I thought you were someone else,” he was Someone Else.”
A few other things. My first impression in reading this book was of its verbosity. Hemon seems to feel every noun deserves a minimum of two adjectives. Yet I quickly stopped noticing this, once Hemon started getting into dialogue, and also once the momentum of the novel picked me up. Unlike Gary Shteyngart (to whom my thoughts leapt reluctantly at the beginning of the book), Hemon’s style of writing betrays discipline and thought, not the sensation of following a trail (of often interesting ideas) through a sloppy glutinous swamp. Moreover, I learned that Hemon learned to write in English by reading Lolita and looking up every unfamiliar word in a dictionary.
Nowhere Man is Hemon’s his second book. The author was born in Sarajevo and, like his protagonist in the book, was in the US on a work-related visit when the war in Bosnia began. He stayed in Chicago, was eventually reunited with his parents, but gave up writing in Serbo-Croat, or Bosnian, for the duration of the war.
Finally, here is some of his thinking on the subject of political fiction. “I'd also say that literature is inherently utopian — and any utopian project is a political project — inasmuch as it has an implicit ambition to show that there's more to the world than these appearances of reality. Even the worst of suburban literature cannot concede that this is it, this is as good as it will ever get. That inherent necessity not to settle for the simple reality of what appears to be the world goes directly — if often inadvertently — against the political propaganda perpetuated by the government in power and the consumerist propaganda (which always claims that a perfect world is just a purchase away) perpetuated by the corporations whose happy, profitable existence is assured by the government. So yes, I'm a political writer…”
Some of the chapters are narrated by first-person narrators who have different relationships to Jozef, and some are narrated in third-person, focusing on Jozef’s life alone. By the end of the novel you understand that all of these personalities hover around a singular person. In fact, in the first chapter (as occurred to me upon a second reading of the book and also of interviews with Hemon), one Jozef meets another Jozef. Showing Jozef through various eyes allows Hemon to give him an emotional sheen without discussing his feelings; the American Pronek is an observer of himself, not yet a person.
This fragmentation of the American Jozef is a main theme. The narrative of his pre-U.S. life is linear. It’s a heartfelt and smoothly written story of growing up – fighting as a boy, rebellion by starting a Beatles band, a numbing stint in the army. Jozef’s division (or multiplication) beings in Ukraine, where he is meant to be exploring his father’s heritage, as war is breaking out in Sarajevo. His life is narrated in the first person by a roommate, a Chicagoan with a Ukrainian father. (A possible third witness lurks in the hidden camera Josef identifies in their dorm room.) The American is jealous of Jozef’s ability to engage with life, to be happy.
This chapter offers a glimpse into the last days of Jozef’s pre-war nature, which nourishes on self, and the calm ennui of his Soviet existence. Once Jozef arrives in the U.S., the story begins to progress in spurts. Jozef no longer seems to know himself, feels he doesn’t have a place. Sitting on the couch of his first Chicago girlfriend, “… he imagined himself imagining himself in this room, dimly lit, waiting for a woman who could only know what he told her in his sloppy English and distorting accent. He saw clearly that who he thought he was and who she thought he was were two different persons. He imagined himself doubled, the two of them sitting next to each other on the damn sofa.”
In the very end of Nowhere Man, the story of his fragmentation reaches an apogee, even as Jozef himself is beginning to heal. The last chapter is a cauldron of people, events and facts, personified by the twisting life of a wily and cruel Ukrainian, taking place in Asia after the Russian Revolution. Though difficult for me to understand, it reminded me of the hotels in Murakami’s writing (isn’t it convenient that the four books I read a year are all just so similar!?), homes of all the nefarious origins for the events in the heroes’ lives, whether real or imagined, the personal-growing-into-the-political, and others. I really liked this parting of ways between the character, Jozef, and his characterization – even as the former finally begins to engage with his new world, the multitude of disruptive forces playing out within him are on full parade.
Here is the author’s explanation of the structure of Nowhere Man. “This is all dandy peachy, but the reality is that everybody expects my (and yours too) writing to be autobiographical and I had to deal with it in some way. So rather than ignore it, I decided to confuse it — hence the "I" of the third person narrator, who is not Pronek, but is closely related. He either imagines Pronek and the life he might have had, or completely imagines him. The third person narrative had to be ruptured, because the narrator is not disinterested, as he/she can never be truly disinterested. As for me, I think of Pronek as my double (or, better, I think of me as Pronek's double). Our lives are parallel, occasionally intersecting, but not identical. ... And his life is parallel to some other lives — most of the lives, I believe, are parallel, or have similar trajectories. To question the absolute "truth" of the self, I had to double the self, and doubling results in multiplication. It all sounds highfalutin (and probably pretentious), but it's a legitimate writing strategy. I'm interested in the world, past and present, not the souls or the selves. I'm interested in connections not the selfish isolation. I'm interested in human, historical networks, not self-containing, extemporal cells of individuality. [my emphasis] I'm interested in transformative possibilities of fiction, not depiction or description. There's a little manifesto.”
So Hemon’s purpose was to represent the interaction of a person in Jozef Pronek’s shoes and the word. (Gratuitous insert – p. 10 – “… I got off the bus across the street from a Chinese restaurant. New World, it was called, and it was empty, only a sign in the window saying FOR LEASE.”) He multiplies Jozef to avoid getting stuck in his “selfish isolation” or even in his nascent “connections” with the friendly and multicultural Americans of the novel – and this makes for a great and complex piece of writing! But the narrators also seem to show you that a person displaced by war can imagine a too-large variety not only of the places he could travel to, but also of the places he could have come from.
Here is a list of invented names and home countries that Jozef Pronek gives to the people whose homes he canvasses working for Greenpeace. It has the air of aimlessness and wandering, but shot through with displacement not just of the spiritual kind, but of the physical also. “To a young couple in Evanston who sat on their sofa holding hands, Pronek introduced himself as Mirza from Bosnia. To a college girl in La Grance with DE PAW stretching across her bosom he introduced himself as Sergei Katastrofenko from Ukraine… To an old couple from Romania in Homewood, who could speak no English and sat with their hands gently touching their knees, he was John from Liverpool… To a bunch of potbellied Christian bikers barbecuing on a Walgreen’s parking lot in Elk Grove Village, he was Joseph from Snitzlland (the homeland of the snitzl.) To a woman in Hyde Park who opened the door with a gorgeous grin, which then transmogrified into a suspicious smirk as she said, “I thought you were someone else,” he was Someone Else.”
A few other things. My first impression in reading this book was of its verbosity. Hemon seems to feel every noun deserves a minimum of two adjectives. Yet I quickly stopped noticing this, once Hemon started getting into dialogue, and also once the momentum of the novel picked me up. Unlike Gary Shteyngart (to whom my thoughts leapt reluctantly at the beginning of the book), Hemon’s style of writing betrays discipline and thought, not the sensation of following a trail (of often interesting ideas) through a sloppy glutinous swamp. Moreover, I learned that Hemon learned to write in English by reading Lolita and looking up every unfamiliar word in a dictionary.
Nowhere Man is Hemon’s his second book. The author was born in Sarajevo and, like his protagonist in the book, was in the US on a work-related visit when the war in Bosnia began. He stayed in Chicago, was eventually reunited with his parents, but gave up writing in Serbo-Croat, or Bosnian, for the duration of the war.
Finally, here is some of his thinking on the subject of political fiction. “I'd also say that literature is inherently utopian — and any utopian project is a political project — inasmuch as it has an implicit ambition to show that there's more to the world than these appearances of reality. Even the worst of suburban literature cannot concede that this is it, this is as good as it will ever get. That inherent necessity not to settle for the simple reality of what appears to be the world goes directly — if often inadvertently — against the political propaganda perpetuated by the government in power and the consumerist propaganda (which always claims that a perfect world is just a purchase away) perpetuated by the corporations whose happy, profitable existence is assured by the government. So yes, I'm a political writer…”
posted by Katherine at 10:04 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home