Nowhere Story

I truthfully don’t know how to write a review about a book like this. On the one hand, I feel compelled to defend my intellectual capacity to analyze literature, but on the other hand, I kind of just want to admit that I don’t get it.

On the surface, there’s not that much to “get.” Nowhere Man is comprised of several stories at different times from different viewpoints that all describe the life of Josef Pronek, a Bosnian ex-pat who moves to Chicago in his third or fourth decade. This is an interesting device which has the result of letting us see snapshots of this character at different stages that aren’t necessarily related, just for the sake of character development; it also gives us distinctly different perspectives about Pronek, also for the sake of character development, but additionally because it asks us to examine the values and perspectives of the person wielding that lens as well.

The stories are each compellingly written, with some very clever turns of phrase and observational humor that lead me to believe that Hemon is some kind of genius or language savant, because his grasp of English as a second language is masterful — a few overblown similes aside.

So what’s the problem? I’m not sure. I appreciated the technical aspects of Nowhere Man, but as a whole, it left me cold. By the time it ended, I wasn’t dying to know more about Pronek, despite being given a character profile that was ostensibly meant to reveal some, but leave a lot more undisclosed. The setting before Chicago of the turmoil in the Balkans-Slavic countries was more interesting to me than the character piece. I don’t know — it’s like I said, there was a lot to like and appreciate here, but it didn’t resonate with me.