Nowhere Man

Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Question of Bruno, one of the most celebrated debuts in recentAmerican fiction, returns with the mind- and language-bending adventures of hisendearing protagonist Jozef Pronek.A native of Sarajevo, where he spends his adolescence tryingto become Bosnia's answer to John Lennon, Jozef Pronek comes to the UnitedStates in 1992-just in time to watch war break out in his country but too earlyto be a genuine refugee. Indeed, Jozef's typical answer to inquiries about hisorigins and ethnicity is, 'I am complicated.'And so he proves to be-not just to himself, but to therevolving series of shadowy but insightful narrators who chart his progressfrom Sarajevo to Chicago; from a hilarious encounter with the first PresidentBush to a somewhat graver meeting with a heavily armed Serb whom he hasbeen hired to serve with court papers. Moving, disquieting, and exhilarating inits virtuosity, Nowhere Man is thekaleidoscopic portrait of a magnetic young man stranded in America by the warin Bosnia.