Aleksandar Hemon: Nowhere Man

And it was in Suzhou, in the Humble Administrator’s garden — reading Wasserstein in the shade of one of the pavilions, carps splashing the placid surface, lotus leaves spreading as far as the eye could see, gentle trees leaning over water, as if over a looking-glass — it was there that I found out that we had been staying in and were going back to Pick’s room, room 741 at the former Cathay Hotel. Need I say I was overwhelmed, with delight and unraveling fear at the same time? The coincidence — or better, the convergence — implied, glaringly, the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, but not necessarily benevolent being. When I told my wife about my discovery, she hugged me gently as if it were all my fault and she were forgiving me. I remembered the first time she hugged me, after I had stumbled down the stairs. “Are you good?” she had asked me, in Russian, for some reason.

And she told me something I had not known. She told me that her grandfather, a Jewish Shanghailander, had been detained after the Japanese took over the International Settlement, and she told me that it may have been Pick who tortured him. My wife’s grandfather never talked much about it, but they all knew what it had been like: he had tied him tightly in wet sheets, until his blood vessels were bursting into blotchy bruises (I saw them once, on his chest, shaped like unknown continents, when we went to visit him in Florida). Then the sheets slowly dried, almost squeezing him to death, until the body was so senseless that the only thing left was the part of your mind that could feel the pain. We immediately left the Humble Administrator’s tranquillity behind us, and boarded the train to Shanghai, where a devastating fever was awaiting us — we kept wiping the sweat off our bodies, but the perspiration would not stop.

That night someone tried to break into our room — I leapt out of my feverish dream, and charged to the door, yelling, “Who is it? Who is it?” but there was no response. As my heart was slamming against my chest walls, my wife’s screams fading, as our nightmares were merging, I imagined Pick’s painted face on the other side of the door. When I looked outside through the fish-eye peephole, there was, of course, no one outside, just the vacuously buzzing hall. I did not share my vision with my wife, but she must have known what I was thinking. In her eyes, I could see the somnolent terror twinkling as the ludicrous reflection of the exit sign.

But we, of course, knew that it must have been a drunken hotel guest trying to open our door, the wrong door, for that happens in every hotel, anywhere in the world.

The night of August 9—the anniversary of Pick’s last supper — I was woken up by my wife squeezing my hand (we held hands sleeping). I heard a body falling on the floor with a feeble thump, and then moving through the room: noises ebbing and flowing rhythmically, purposefully. We listened and received sounds coming from different corners, sometimes simultaneously. We sensed every whiff of air, vibrations of the space around us, frozen with fear, interrupting our breathing to hear better. We could not say anything, but we expected Pick to appear before us, in his magician’s cape, and begin to sing in his bass voice, replete with blood-curdling nostalgia: “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep.” We heard Pick’s song in the rustle and bustle of the creature in the darkness, in the pitter-patter of little paws, in the pallid, oval field of the weak firelight, in the center of which there was a mouse, stopped to look at us, waiting for us to make an uncertain move before vanishing. I lay in the darkness, awake, paralyzed, biting the knuckle of my index finger, waiting for the evil to hatch out of the furry lump pulsating with life, and come right at me, and it did. It is right inside me now, clawing at the walls of my chest, trying to get out, and I can do nothing to stop it. So I get up.

‘Hemon paints a hilarious, parodic picture of city life, but it is his language that really sings: it has the unmistakable tenor of quality. . I should not be at all surprised if Hemon wins the Nobel Prize at some point’ GILES FODEN, Condé Nast Traveller

‘Hemon juggles narratives and voices and plays all sorts of literary games with great aplomb. . The novel’s sheer exuberance, its generosity and its engagement with life should win over all but the most curmudgeonly of readers’ Sunday Times

‘Downbeat but also hilarious, while the writing itself is astonishing’ Time Out

‘Ultimately this is a sad, beautiful book that reveals the inevitability of conflict, the redemptive force of friendship and the importance of understanding your origins even when presently lost’ Independent on Sunday

‘The entire book teems with a quivering, off-kilter strangeness’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Pronek is a memorable addition to the pantheon of outsiders looking in. . Hemon’s linguistic trickery, meanwhile, is the perfect medium for making the everyday seem strange’ Arena

‘Startles with the gift of making us see the mundane world anew. . Confirmed by this book as a master of economy and observation, Hemon gives the impression that. . delightful and accomplished as this novel is, those he has yet to write will be astonishing’ Guardian

‘One of the most interesting and powerful voices in contemporary literature’ Esquire

Hemon’s surrealism is a subtle presence. . The narrative is also carried by his wit, which is sharp and intelligent. . It is the warmth of Hemon’s writing, however, which lifts it above the level of cleverness and into something more interesting. . It is his characters which are likely to stay with readers the longest’ The Times

‘Writing as sharp as anything you’ll read all year’ GQ

‘This is a novelist fulfilling a poet’s obligation, to see and to speak the world afresh. . Bold, original, adventurous and humane’ Water stone’s Books Quarterly

‘Devastatingly simple: the merit of Nowhere Man rests on far more than literary stunts. It’s a study of the human condition’ Washington Post

‘Hemon can’t write a boring sentence, and the English language is the richer for it. . [ Nowhere Man ] will very likely serve as a springboard for even greater feats of the imagination from Aleksandar Hemon’ New York Times

‘Hemon, a virtuoso linguist, stylist and social observer, delivers a searing and mordantly funny novel about the dislocation of his protagonist, Jozef Pronek. . This angst-ridden, horny Balkan is deeply human, totally irresistible and often hilarious’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘Every sentence of this novel is infused with energy and wit’ Los Angeles Times