Enjoyment
Aleksandar Hemon: Aleksandar the great
Bosnian-born writer Aleksandar Hemon's first book, written in English, provoked comparisons with Nabokov. Kate Zambreno talked to him about memory, football and his new novel
14 June 2003
Aleksandar Hemon may be a little bored. He speaks in a steady monotone as if tired of talking about what happened before, as if the wrong questions are being asked - but he answers them anyway. The 38-year-old writer - clean-shaven, short hair, a beefy soccer build - looks eminently normal, unlike the man with the slanted hat and haunted Slavic features scowling from the dust jacket of his first novel, Nowhere Man (Picador, £15.99).
Maybe I was expecting Jozef Pronek, the alienated yet idealist anti-hero first featured in the novella "Blind Jozef Pronek and the Dead Souls", from Hemon's début collection, The Question of Bruno. Pronek also stars in Nowhere Man. It's hard to ignore the striking similarities with the Bosnian-born protagonist who, like Hemon, arrived in Chicago in 1992 after a month-long young journalists' exchange programme, and chose to stay in the US when war broke out at home. I note Hemon's outfit and try to picture Joseph Conrad showing up for an interview in a Wilco T-shirt and shorts.
Hemon, "Sasha" to friends, does not attempt to romanticise his past. When he tells me that he grew up near a movie theatre, I offer some nostalgic sugar-coating. Like Cinema Paradiso? "Yeah ... well, I hate that movie. It's just sappy and slow." He also played in a Beatles cover band, like his alter ego Pronek. They did a few shows in music-education class; Hemon could only play the simple chords, like in "Help!" "I was George." "The shy and sensitive one?" I try again to rewrite his past. "No," he chuckles. "The one who didn't do much."
The questions that seem to bore Hemon most are those that ask him to pinpoint his identity on the shredded map of former Yugoslavia. In Nowhere Man, an American asks Pronek, "Are you a Serb or a Muslim?" " 'I am complicated,' Pronek said, and retched. The car was like a gas chamber, and Pronek felt an impulse to rise and breathe from the pocket of air just under the roof. 'You can say I am the Bosnian.' "
Hemon corrects me sharply when I call his native language Serbo-Croat. "No, I'm not Serbian. I am Bosnian. I was born and raised in Bosnia, but as far as my identity, it's really far more complicated," he repeats bluntly, almost bitterly. "It doesn't mean much to me."
Tall tales circulate among envious writers about how Hemon, in just three years after 1992, learnt English well enough to write his lauded collection, The Question of Bruno. Published in 2000, it drew flattering comparisons with the Eastern European-born masters Nabokov and Conrad, both of whom wrote their greatest works in English. Some say that Hemon could finish a New York Times crossword puzzle within a week of unpacking his suitcases in Chicago.
The most-repeated part of the mythology is that this linguistic prodigy, who "handles English as though it were nitroglycerine", as one critic raved, picked up the language by highlighting the obscure words in Nabokov's Lolita. This talk bores Hemon as well. For the record, he did highlight the difficult words, as with other novels he read. And he came to America with a "capable tourist" grasp of the language, having slept through English classes.
There were many things about being an unemployed stranger in a strange land that terrified him during those early years in Chicago. But why is it such a surprise that he could become an expert stylist in such a short period? "It strangely never occurred to me that I couldn't write in English," he shrugs, demonstrating a Nabokov-sized ego. Simply, he chose to learn English because he realised he was going to set down roots in Chicago.
Hemon goes on to muse that he never has writer's block and doesn't write for months at a time (except his weekly column for a Bosnian publication and the occasional magazine piece). "I have no ambition," he says. "Playing soccer, watching soccer, watching movies, and just idling. I'm a great idler." He uses a kind of circular logic to describe his craft: "It's important not to write if you are a writer."
Samuel Beckett used to say that he dreamed in English and wrote in French. Hemon's world isn't so neatly divided. "I'm, like, pathologically bilingual," he says. "Sometimes I don't know which language I'm using. I write in both of them, think in both of them. There was a time, early on after I arrived in Chicago ... and I had a sense that there was a profound discrepancy between what I wanted to say and what I was saying in English. And I felt like I was kind of lying at all times."
Nabokov once said that Lolita was an exercise in making love to the English language, one that unleashed what many - Hemon included - consider the greatest novel of the 20th century. Although Hemon's lovely wry prose nowhere equals the feverish intensity of Nabokov's, there is a similar sense of a visceral struggle with language. Elsewhere, Hemon has joked, that in comparison to the orgasmic pitch of Lolita, his first book was an experience in "heavy petting". As for Nowhere Man, "I guess I've moved on to first base."
Hemon still gets along with his fellow exiles. "Somehow the events in my life are not an orderly series of events," he says. "They're disconnecting, disorganised, propelled by the memory. Those things that are taken out of it - that's where I live. In those spaces, between those events." He feels at home in Chicago, in the Edgewater neighbourhood where he lives with his wife of four years, Lisa. (The legendary interviewer and oral historian Studs Terkel lives just down the street.) He's comfortable in an alienated existence, among fellow "mongrels". He likes going to the grocery store and hearing many different languages. He has played soccer with the same group of fellow-immigrants for seven years.
Although Hemon calls himself a loyal Chicagoan, the relationship of the writer to his city can best be described as love-hate. Or, like the word on the T-shirt of Pronek's Greenpeace companion, EVOL (love backwards). "It's no paradise," he says. "It's no Paris. There's injustice, and racism, you know. You just have to drive around to see it. The police, and corruption, and the history," he says of the city that served as torturing muse for Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel.
Hemon's protagonist Pronek has his own sense of living behind history, alienated and displaced, but with an outsider perspective, heavy on irony. Pronek is an existential character, an urban nomad who, as in the Beatles song, "doesn't have a point of view". Observed by different narrators, he wanders through the worn-down yellow-brick road of minimum-wage jobs (like canvassing for Greenpeace in the suburbs), and rubs up against American culture in strange ways, whether taking an ESL course, or meeting a Chicago acting student who wants to mimic his accent.
There's a Bosnian sentiment called sevdah that has no English equivalent, perhaps because it carries an essence of Eastern European suffering and instability. In Nowhere Man, Hemon describes it as "pleasant soul pain, when you are at peace with your woeful life, which allows you to enjoy this very moment with abandon". Perhaps this is why the writer, when asked to remember, prefers a convenient amnesia, living in the now as opposed to then.
Hemon unwraps a piece of candy, sucking pensively as he begins a story. As a young Bosnian journalist, he interviewed Benazir Bhutto when she was prime minister of Pakistan. He tells how she went to visit her father, once prime minister himself and now in solitary confinement. She asked her father how he could endure long days in prison, waiting for his eventual execution. "And he said that he would pick a day from his life, and try to remember it in its entirety. One day. It's an incredible project, really."
Now Hemon the philosopher, no longer the slightly bored interview subject, is caught in this thought, staring at the candy wrapper. "Because, do you know what you did on 6 October last year? You can pinpoint existence, you can possibly look at your credit card and may notice you were somewhere. But how about a memory of walking down the street and seeing the sunlight hit at a certain angle?
"Memory is re-creation. Do you know what I mean?... The trick is to tell the truth about human life while lying."
Kate Zambreno is assistant editor of 'Newcity' magazine in Chicago, where a version of this interview first appeared
Biography
Born in 1964, Aleksandar Hemon grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and became a journalist. In 1992, he travelled to America on a US-sponsored goodwill tour. His home city came under siege while he was in Chicago, where he stayed as a refugee. After a wide variety of low-level, minimum-wage jobs, he started writing in his second language, English, in 1995. His acclaimed collection of stories, The Question of Bruno, provoked comparisons with Conrad, Nabokov and Kundera when it appeared in 2000, and won several awards. Aleksandar Hemon's first novel, Nowhere Man, which features the character Jozef Pronek from The Question of Bruno, is published next week by Picador. He still lives, with his wife, in Chicago.
