Hemon - Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies

Acclaim for Aleksandar Hemons
NOWHERE MAN

The kind of bold talent that doesnt come around very often . Hemon again displays his prodigious giftsnearly every sentence of this novel is infused with energy and wit.

Los Angeles Times

Hemon delivers a crazed, kaleidoscopic rendering of the waning years of Soviet rule.

Chicago Tribune

The merit of Nowhere Man rests on far more than gimmicky, literary stunts. Its a study of the human condition, sad as it is today.

The Washington Post Book World

The stock immigrant tale gets turned inside out by a smart, witty Sarajevo native with an eye for absurdity.

Newsweek

I wish I had written Nowhere Man, by Aleksandar Hemon, but I couldnt have written it, because no one can write like Hemon. He has the most unusual, poetic vision in the world. This book is moving and beautiful.

Jonathan Safran Foer,
author of Everything Is Illuminated

Readers of Nowhere Man are present for the rise of an exciting new literary voice.

Philadelphia City Paper

Hemon paints a hilarious parodic picture of city life, but it is his language that really sings: it has the unmistakable tenor of quality, reminiscent at once of Bohumil Hrabals I Served the King of England and Milan Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I should not be at all surprised if Hemon wins the Nobel Prize at some point.

Giles Foden, Cond Nast Traveller

Funny, profoundly moving and multilayered . [Hemon] is creating a richer understanding of the immigrant experience.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Now heres reason to get excited: a true work of art thats as vast and mysterious as life itself. Hemon, in just two books, and in just two years (if you havent read The Question of Bruno, do), has quickly become essential in the way that, say, Nabokov is essential . This tender, devastating book is evidence indeed that Hemon is a writer of rare artistry and depth.

Esquire

Hemon has the vision of an outsider and uses English like a new toy . Highly entertaining . Writing as sharp and inventive as anything youll read all year.

GQ

Aleksandar Hemon

NOWHERE MAN

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, which appeared on Best Books of 2000 lists nationwide, won several literary awards, and was published in eighteen countries. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon arrived in Chicago in 1992, began writing in English in 1995, and now his work appears regularly in The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories.

Books by Aleksandar Hemon

The Question of Bruno
Nowhere Man

Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul. Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that havexy occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hangingxy in the air, errant and homeless?

Bruno Schulz,
from The Age of Genius

CHICAGO, APRIL 18, 1994

Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chesta recurring nightmare. But I was awake, listening to the mizzle in my pillow, to the furniture furtively sagging, to the house creaking under the wind assaults. I straightened my legs, so the blanket ebbed and my right foot rose out of the sludge of darkness like a squat, extinguished lighthouse. The blinds gibbered for a moment, commenting on my performance, then settled in silence.

I closed the bathroom door and the hooked towels trembled. There was the pungent smell of the plastic shower curtain and disintegrating soap. The toilet bowl was agape, with a dissolving piece of toilet paper in it throbbing like a jellyfish. The faucet was sternly counting off droplets. I took off my underwear and let it lie in a pile, then stepped behind the curtain and let the water run. Wee rainbows locked in bubbles streamed into the inevitable, giddy whirl, as I fantasized about melting under the shower and disappearing into the drain.

I went down the stairs, carrying a mound of dirty laundry, careful not to trip over the inquisitive cat. I put the laundry on top of the washing machine, which shuddered as though delighted, and pulled the rope pending in the darknesscobwebs sprung into the air around the bulb. I had to wait for the spin to throttle to a stop before I could put my laundry in the machine, so I followed the cat into the other room. There were boxes full of things that must have been left by the tenantswho might they have been?who used to live in one of the apartments: wallpaper scrolls, a broken-boned umbrella, a soulless football, a bundle of shoes with crescent soles, a pictureless frame, skeins of anonymous dust. Back in the laundry room, I transferred the sodden clothes of the upstairs people to the dryer, then loaded the washing machine. In the other room, the cat was galloping around and producing noises of struggle, pursuing something I could not see.

Today was the interview day. I had calledyears ago, it seemed nowand set up an interview for an ESL teaching job, strictly out of despair. I had been laid off from the Art Institute bookstore once the merry Christmas season, including the mad aftermath of the Big Sale, was over. My job there had been to unpack boxes of books, shelve the books, and then smash the boxes and throw them away. Smashing the boxes was my favorite part, the controlled, benign destruction.

Two white eggs roiled in the boiling water, like iris-less eyes. The floor was sticky, so I had to unpeel my bare soles from the floor with every stepI thought of the movies in which people walk on the ceiling, upside down. A cockroach was scuttling across the cutting board, trying to reach the safety behind the stove. I imagined the greasy warmth, the vales of dirt, the wires winding like roads. I imagined getting there, still clutching a crumb of skin, after almost being cut in half by something immense coming down on me.

I had tried other bookstores, but they didnt want me. I had tried getting a job as a waiter, elaborately lying about my previous waiting experience in the best Sarajevo restaurants, high European class all, and nonexistent on top of that. I had spent my measly savings and was in the furniture-selling phase. I sold, for the total of seventy-four dollars, a decaying futon with a rich cat-barf pattern; a hobbly table with four chairs, inexplicably scarred, as if they had walked through fields of barbed wire. I was late with my rent, and had already looked up the word eviction in the dictionary, hoping that the secondary, obsolete meaning (The action of conquering a country or of obtaining something by conquest) would override my landlords primary meaning and save my ass.