Description: A native of Sarajevo, where he spends his adolescence trying to become Bosnia's answer to John Lennon, Jozef Pronek comes to the United States in 1992--just in time to watch war break out in his country, but too early to be a genuine refugee. Indeed, Jozef's typical answer to inquiries about his origins and ethnicity is, "I am complicated."
And so he proves to be--not just to himself, but to the revolving series of shadowy but insightful narrators who chart his progress from Sarajevo to Chicago; from a hilarious encounter with the first President Bush to a somewhat more grave one with a heavily armed Serb whom he has been hired to serve with court papers. Moving, disquieting, and exhilarating in its virtuosity, Nowhere Man is the kaleidoscopic portrait of a magnetic young man stranded in America by the war in Bosnia.Review Quotes: "One of literature's most engaging lost young men since Augie March. . . . Hemon can't write a boring sentence, and the English language . . . is the richer for it." --The New York Times Book Review
"A charmingly discombobulated take on life and language. . . . Hemon makes ordinary occurrences read like psychic disturbances." --The Village Voice "A virtuoso linguist, stylist and social observer . . . Hemon delivers a searing, mordantly funny novel. . . . The angst-ridden, horny, adolescent Balkan he depicts is deeply human, totally irresistible and often hilarious, and by turns culturally specific and universal." --San Francisco Chronicle "Hemon's fractured story will haunt you long after you want it to, as you slowly realize that just because the last sentence ended with a period, all that was said before continues." -Chicago Sun-Times