FictionIn the magic lantern show of his autobiographical Speak, Memory, Nabokov conjures up the luminous image of his childhood English grammar book. At the end of this resonant text was a story to be read once the student had completed the exercises: it opened up "that promised land where, at last, words are meant to mean what they mean".
If Aleksandar Hemon's writing is routinely compared to Nabokov's (part of the wonder of his work is the legend of this Yugoslavian writer learning English by reading Nabokov), the real nature of the link is there, in the space between language as awkward apprenticeship and comfortable authority. Hemon's style never relaxes into easy intimacy with his new language. The opening chapter of Nowhere Man announces a skewed sense of metaphor ("two white eggs roiled in the boiling water, like vision-less eyes") and a descriptive knack by turns mellifluous ("the furniture furtively sagging") and freshly peculiar ("your pockets are your hands' home").
But Hemon's skill with his exile-edged instrument is not just a matter of stylistic brio; it frames a portrait of linguistic and cultural dislocation which is never less than startling. Like Hemon, his hero Jozeph Pronek has left his native Sarajevo just before that city's catastrophe; in America, his identity is mistranslated, as if he has been "doubled" into his own incompetent interpreter. His consistent misuse of the definite article ("what's difference?" he complains: "you understand me") is precisely observed: the exile is trapped between crude linguistic presence and idiomatic absence; his listeners comprehend but fail to understand.
Nowhere Man is a kaleidoscope of competing visions of Pronek: the story of his childhood and adolescence is told by an American student; a private investigator hires him to speak his "monkey language" to a fellow Bosnian; his American girlfriend won't stop correcting his grammar. All of which could make for a novel of uniform bleakness, a mere lament for what both Hemon and Pronek have lost. But Nowhere Man is the second book of what Hemon calls "the Pronek fantasies" (the first was the acclaimed The Question of Bruno), and its author never lets his hero slump into pathos: his exile in language is also what makes him a mythic figure, for whom unconfessed private pain becomes the possibility of storytelling: "your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend".
Brian Dillon is an academic and critic
Nowhere Man By Aleksandar Hemon Picador, 242pp, £15.99
