Novelist Aleksandar Hemon gives the answer, “lovers,” when I ask whom he imagines as occupants of the 64 rooms identical to the one where he slept the previous night, after his reading.

“The Oberlin Inn is full of young lovers,” he says, voice dry, whisking his shot of espresso with a swizzle stick. Although I do not believe that it is, in fact, young lovers flicking the cablevision at the Oberlin Inn on this cold, un-holiday December Thursday, I appreciate his sentimentality.

I do not expect this romanticism from this close-cropped, clean-shaven man; a Bosnian from Sarajevo who left his home in 1992 on a cross-cultural journalism fellowship and ended up displaced by war. A man who found employment as a house-cleaner, then a Greenpeace canvasser equipped with clipboard and the ability to carry on conversation that depended on the affirmative nods and wide-eyed cools taught by a 19 year old supervisor; a Public Enemy fan who moved to America with “a good tourist’s understanding of English” and then, eight years later, published his first novel, The Question of Bruno. I do not expect sentimentality from Hemon, who likens the protagonist of Nowhere Man’s first post-natal window-pane view to a nuclear explosion.

At the end of this first collection of stories, Hemon acknowledges his wife, Lisa Stoddard, for handling his “shifting identities with grace and making Operation Bruno possible.” It was in this ‘Operation Bruno,’ the collection’s keystone story “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls” that this protagonist of Nowhere Man first came under invention.

Using several unnamed narrators and traversing several cities Chicago, Sarajevo and Shanghai Nowhere Man tells the story of this Jozef Pronek, a Bosnian who, in years when his Sarajevo is lit with exploding markets and NATO tanks, falls into life elsewhere. While the story happens in discreet, datelined strands Hemon simplified Wednesday evening’s reading by selecting vignettes from only the novel’s mid natal section.

Fittingly, this hunk of the book deals largely in matters of the body. As the Nowhere Man narrator explains “the molten lava of [Pronek’s] early experiences,” when “a few awkward rocks formed” such as a diaper change during which “he peed in a perfect arc on an electric heater, discontinuing the stream just in time not to get electrocuted, the piss evaporating like an unfinished dream.” Later, an Aida allows him to “explore ‘the jungle below the equator’” a jungle he has trouble penetrating.

Josef Pronek is not a simple alter ego, or shadow of the man who read in Craig Auditorium Wednesday evening. Rather, he is a kind of intermediary giving flashes into this broad-shouldered man who makes
the chairs at the Java Zone appear small as he looks me straight in the eye and tells me about going door to door as a thickly accented introvert.

“There is nothing like the American suburbs in Yugoslavia. It was more exotic than any other place in the world, the houses on the street all looking the same. Once I remember being on some kind of cul-de sac, going to a house and being turned away, then going back to look at my map and going to the next marked house.

“Another guy opens the door, he doesn’t look familiar. ‘You were just here,’ he says. That’s what people say, ‘you were just here,’ you just meaning Greenpeace or a door to door seller and I say ‘No, no I have never been here,’ and he says ‘Yes you were, remember a few minutes ago?’ And I remember.”

He tells another story about a man in Glencoe, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, who opened a door with a gun at his belt. “I said, ‘I am from Greenpeace and I am scared,’” Hemon recounts. “He said ‘go away.’”

He speaks of returning to Sarajevo after these years in Chicago, after the war. “I was walking and my body remembered. My body recognized that geography of the city. I turned to look at a movie theatre, it was not there.”

And it is this belief in physical remembrance, a broken wall, a fallen theatre, a bang of knees against the sides of a bed, which lives within so much of Hemon’s writing.
“The hard part of writing a narrative of someone’s life,” Hemon says of Nowhere Man, “is choosing from the abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignificant. If one elects to include only the important events -- the births, the deaths
the loves, humiliations the uprisings the needs and the beginnings -- one denies the real substance of life: the ephemera, the nether moments much too small to be recorded”

Hemon’s Pronek recalls squatting behind the bushes of a hotel with his first love, “trying hard not to keel over onto a used condom someone left behind.” With un-squinting eyes on the imperfect, ephemeral past, Pronek remembers putting his arm around the shoulder of his love, “like a dead fish,” and “groping on benches in a dark park, occasionally interrupted by a drunk who fondly remembered his first groping on the same bench years ago.”

And just as I was stirred in some small, important way by the thought of lovers flipping through fifty-cent postcards of Tappan Square and spending the night under the Oberlin Inn’s machine-sewn patchwork blankets, it is Pronek’s “dead fish” memories and those of all the other somewhere/nowhere speakers that will, in the words Hemon gave at the close of his reading Wednesday night, “tell an alternative history of human life.”