Nowhere Man - Hardcover

Hemon, Aleksandar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330393499 ISBN 13: 9780330393492

Publisher: Picador, 2003

Synopsis

The mind- and language-bending adventures of Hemon's endearing protagonist Jozef Pronek This is what we know about Jozef Pronek from reading of his exploits in The Question of Bruno. He is a young man from Sarajevo who arrived in the US in 1992, just in time to watch war break out back home on TV. Stranded in Chicago, he proved himself a charming and perceptive observer of - and participant in - American life. With Nowhere Man, Pronek, accidental urban nomad, gets his own book. From the grand causes of Jozef's adolescence - principally, fighting to change the face of rock and roll and struggling to lose his virginity - up through a fleeting encounter with George Bush (the first) in Kiev, to enrolment in a Chicago English-language class and the glorious adventures of minimum-wage living, Pronek's experiences are at once touchingly familiar and bracingly out-of-the-ordinary.But the story of his life is not so simple as a series of global adventures. Pronek is continually haunted by an unseen observer, his movements chronicled by narrators with dubious motives-all of which culminates in a final episode that upends many of our assumptions about Pronek's identity, while illustrating precisely what it means to be a Nowhere Man.'An entire book about Jozef Pronek, the Bosnian refugee par excellence . . . Hemon's observations are rarely off-target, and language remains his dearest friend . . . The bottom line is that Hemon can't write a boring sentence, and the English language is the richer for it . . . 'Nowhere Man' succeeds more often than it fails and will very likely serve as a springboard for even greater feats of the imagination from Aleksandar Hemon' New York Times

About this title

Review

Downbeat but also hilarious, while the writing itself is astonishing, a feast of the oblique and unexpected. -- Time Out, June 2003

Hemon's linguistic trickery... is the perfect medium for making the everyday seem strange. -- Arena (Book of the Month) June 2003

I should not be at all surprised if Hemon wins the Nobel Prize at some point. -- Giles Foden in Conde Nast Traveller, May 2003

If the plot is mercury, quick and elusive, sentence by sentence and word for word, Aleksandar Hemon's writing is gold. -- Times Literary Supplement, June 2003

One of the most interesting and powerful voices in contemporary literature. -- Esquire (Book of the Month) June 2003

Book Description

The mind- and language-bending adventures of Hemon's endearing protagonist Jozef Pronek.

The mind- and language-bending adventures of Hemon's endearing protagonist Jozef Pronek.

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0330393499
• ISBN 13: 9780330393492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256