Darling of the "New Yorker," and now, finally, master of that very familiar kind of virtuoso late twentieth-century easily eloquent but somewhat watery post-Nabokovian prose. But why master something so thoroughly known? Bourgeois, in the old-fashioned sense, in its ambitions and in its ideas. Forgettable. ( )

Nowhere Man is published as a novel, yet the seven stories comprising it do not necessarily create the coherent whole we have grown accustomed to call “a novel.” But the book’s epigraph, a quote from The Age of Genius by Bruno Schulz, might give us a clue to the novel’s structure and inner logic, that is, to the author’s vision of space and time. If narratives are by their nature built upon the continuity and successiveness of events, what happens, Schulz asks, “with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, decided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, errant and homeless?”

“Passover,” the first story in the novel, takes place in Chicago on April 18, 1994; “Yesterday” happens in Sarajevo between September 10, 1967, and January 24, 1992, and it describes Pronek’s life in his home country from birth up to the last day before his departure to the States. As in the presumably mythicized version of Aleksandar Hemon’s autobiography in “Exchange of Pleasant Words” from The Question of Bruno, Pronek’s family is Bosnian Ukrainian. When he goes for the first time to Ukraine, he meets a woman “he would one day visit in Chicago”—a visit described in “Blind Josef and Dead Souls” where we find out that he arrives in the States on January 26, 1992 (The Question of Bruno).

The coherence between, and precise matching of the important dates in the characters’ lives is uncanny given the fact that we are dealing here with two different books. Is it possible that the arrangement of the stories in these two books was done by Hemon in a different way than what his editors ultimately decided, and “Blind Josef Pronek” was initially part of “The Pronek Fantasies”? Or is this shuffling of stories deliberate—as the quote from Schulz suggests? If the latter is true, the mastery of such complex structures as that of Hemon’s books is extraordinary. The technique in which a story from one book complements another book’s events and characters, thus giving the illusion of a three-dimensional reality, was invented by Balzac in the Comédie Humaine in the desire to compete with reality itself and to create a self-sufficient fictional universe. Hemon has more modest and more modern aspirations, as his desire for the whole is paralleled by a desire for the interrupted and the fragmented. His Sebald-like technique of mixing artifacts (photos, some of which are of “real” people) with the fabric of the story has the effect of blurring the line between the real and the fictional, and the fiction acquires what Roland Barthes called “the effect of the real” (i.e., a lifelike feeling).

“Fatherland” takes us to Ukraine in 1991, where the narrator, an American of Ukrainian origin meets Pronek, a Bosnian also of Ukrainian origin. “Translated by Josef Pronek” takes place in Sarajevo in December 1995—a sober and minimalist rendering of war violence, sparing us the exotic spice some authors feel obligated to add when writing about wars. The last piece, “Nowhere Man,” a hilarious parody of spy stories, spans over a hundred years, from 1900 in Kiev to 2000 in Shanghai. Here, Pronek appears episodically as one of the names of the Spy known as Captain Pick. “Nowhere Man,” which gives the novel its title, is emblematic of the structure of the entire book. This is not a return to Pronek’s roots, since the Pronek in this story was born in September 1900 in Kiev, while the Pronek in “Yesterday” and presumably all the other stories was born in Sarajevo on September 10, 1967. The two Proneks are two different incarnations at different times and places of the idea of Pronek, of Pronek as a possibility. Moreover, one of the men in Pronek’s circle in Shanghai is Alex Hemon, “a former member of the Purple Gang in Detroit, a hit man who has to kill somebody every time he gets drunk.” Pronek is also the man who turns in to the police Sorge from “The Sorge Spy Ring” (The Question of Bruno). Both Hemon and Sorge are mentioned only in passing, as if they were familiar members of a family the reader is acquainted with. (Incidentally, Sorge also reappears in the last story of The Question of Bruno, “Imitation of Life.”)

It is, of course, possible that Josef Pronek from “Nowhere Man” is the father of Josef Pronek from “Yesterday” since they are both of Ukrainian origin. It is up to the reader to fill in the blanks, since the author only gives us apparently disconnected stories in which the characters cross paths and reemerge under new incarnations. What distinguishes Hemon from other writers is not that his books break with the linear structure of storytelling—there is nothing new about that, as numerous contemporary American films and novels do it; but in doing so, these movies and books tend to follow a predictable pattern: they either start with the end of the story and then go back until the last scene/page is the same as the one at the beginning; or else the story moves back and forth in time between the moment of storytelling and the past when the events occurred. Hemon, on the other hand, builds parallel universes whose characters intersect. The main character from one story makes a brief appearance in another story, thus creating a common universe stitching together the stories that exist out there as broken fragments. It is a paradoxical desire for a total world— paradoxical because Hemon has been described as a “postmodern writer,” and if “postmodern” means anything, the desire for any kind of totality is its very opposite.

Since any creation is ultimately about recreating space and time, a writer’s essence resides in his vision of space and time. From this point of view, Hemon realizes the incredible performance of reconciling Balzac and Schulz. In this, he is entirely postmodern, a writer of multiple origins, a “nowhere man” who may be one of the world’s greatest writers.

This book started off with great promise, but the last chapter let it down somewhat. The writing is brilliant, and every sentence is very evocative and pops out of the page at you, insisting you have a mental picture of it. Wonderful writing and wonderful story. ( )

Obviously talented. Lovely language, mostly skillfully controlled, with just a few faults that ought to have been corrected (the difficulty is that he needs a perfectly bilingual editor, who could tell when the dissonances are deliberate, and when they are not...) Didn't expect to laugh, and yet did, in many places. The hero is the archetypal Bosnian, gentle, funny, irrepressible, filled with the genetic wisdom of sevdah. Topoi: Chicago, Kiev, Ukraine, Sarajevo. Greenpeace canvassers, ESL schools. The cosy provincialism and safety of the seventies in Sarajevo, the heady eighties with the music and theatre scene, the Olympiad, cafes, the most beautiful girls in the world.

And then the underbelly of the urbanity, the greasy dark criminals whose time had come. ( )

The book is heavily bifurcated, and choppy. The story(s) are told by multiple narrators, over multiple time periods. Each chapter weaves a different thread. I would have rated this book higher had it not been for the author's repertoire of sordid, repugnant, abhorrent, queer dross he had to inject in the novel. ( )