Author(s): Hemon Aleksandar

Fiction

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. Now, 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 as 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 subverts many of our assumptions about Pronek's identity, while illustrating precisely what it means to be a Nowhere Man.