Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon

One of the oddest success stories in literature is that of Aleksandar Hemon.

He was born in Bosnia and educated at the University of Sarajevo. In 1992, he visited Chicago, and was stranded in the United States as his country erupted in war. With a passion for literature in a country that did not understand his native language, he was forced to expand his limited English.

Hemon bought a copy of “Lolita” in English and underlined every word he did not know. Once he learned every word, one by one, he began reading volumes upon volumes of American literature and piecing together short stories in 1995. By 1996, his short stories appeared in The New Yorker and Paris Review.

With his collection of short stories, “The Question of Bruno” (2000) his reputation was firmly established among literary circles.

Hemon took a character from that first short story collection, Jozef Pronzek, and fleshed him out in a novel-length work, “Nowhere Man.”

In “Nowhere Man,” Pronzek is a young man living in Sarajevo who loves The Beatles. He plays in a Beatles cover band, hence the title of the novel.

The book seems to be a loosely strung together collection of recollections told by a variety of narrators, lacking the cohesion a novel should have. Even the sense of chronology that drives most novels was primarily absent. The setting jumps around from Chicago to Sarajevo, Shanghai and other places without any real purpose.

Hemon’s strength is in his use of descriptive language, which is very enjoyable, but not enough to carry the novel. Great writing is more than coming up with pretty adjectives.

I admire his style, but he lacks restraint and discrimination. At times, it seems he is ripping off Nabokov, but not doing a very good job and doing it half a century late.

Despite the interesting background of the author, “Nowhere Man” went nowhere.