“Exile is not the right word for my situation,” he contends, “because I stayed connected, I watched the war on TV and I was in touch with people when they were under siege. For someone like Joyce, who I admire immensely, exile was kind of a noble situation, getting out of the Ireland that he found stifling. It was the exile of an artist. To me, exile implies that some fundamental connection is severed, and I don’t feel that way. Wherever I go on these book tours I find someone from Sarajevo, usually someone I know personally, or otherwise one degree of separation. I didn’t know what had happened to people during the war, and so I spent a lot of time tracking down people around the world and getting in touch with them.”

Hemon, in his mid-30s, is a handsome, athletic-looking individual with the buzz cut and demeanour of an intellectual Navy Seal. Possessing an understated humour, there’s a certain steeliness about his manner that fits the case history. Surviving on a succession of minimum wage jobs in Chicago, Hemon not only taught himself to speak English, but how to write it. Really write it. Slogging his way through the canon, notating and logging words he didn’t understand, he developed his craft at an astonishingly rapid pace, forging a lush anti-minimalist style (he holds that language should be “transformative” rather than representational) that earned him inevitable comparisons with other second-language masters such as Nabokov and Conrad. To achieve this, Hemon trained himself to think in English, dream in English, and even remember through English conversations he’d had in his native language with friends years before. In terms of everyday survival though, he lived in constant terror of ending up on the street.

“Maybe it’s this kind of Slavic thing, but you reach a point where you can only think about the next step in your despair,” he recalls. “All I could experience truly was the immediate future, but I kind of suspended the fear so I could operate. A friend of mine, we were working together for Greenpeace – it was a very poorly paid job and I was in debt – and I remember telling her how constantly frightened I was that I would end up on the street, and she said, ‘You don’t have to worry about that’. It was a great relief that she and her husband would help me, and we stayed friends. But there was a time that I didn’t know.”

Within a matter of a couple of years, Hemon’s studies paid off. His work appeared in the ‘New Yorker,’ and his first short story collection ‘The Question Of Bruno’ garnered the sort of critical notice – and advance – most apprentice novelists daydream about between shifts at the pizzeria. Now comes ‘Nowhere Man,’ featuring Pronek, one of the characters in the first book, whose experience mirrors Hemon’s own, adrift in Chicago, contemplating the disintegration of his own personal history, his city and his culture.

“The first book, I was writing out of a need to remember the smallest things,” he says. “The second book was really to try to convey what is lost when something like that happens, the destruction that is not physical destruction.”

There’s one image in ‘Nowhere Man’ so brutal that it punches a hole right through its protagonist’s fond recollections. Pronek ruminates on a childhood sweetheart, an athlete, almost casually relating how she lost both legs in the attacks on Sarajevo, her husband trying to stem the flow of blood from the stumps.

“Most people, when they remember something, they remember it in a sort of utopian way, the way it never was,” he points out. “But if something like that happened, you cannot separate it because your life is changed retroactively by this event. Had there not been a war, it would’ve been just a memory of a girl, and there would’ve been other girls, but suddenly it attained a different value, a different meaning, and this is how his past life is redirected, becomes something else.”

But if Hemon’s own story is a classic fable of the immigrant made good, he holds no old world illusions about the nature of the American Dream. “There’s a different sense of what defines you as a human being in the United States,” he observes. “This is a generalisation, and not all people are like this, but the way that society and capitalism in general operates in the United States is it’s constantly pushing the individual towards isolation, which is often represented as freedom, the idea conceived by the mainstream media of living alone in the suburbs far away from other people, and you have all of your privacy. Which you don’t because there are cameras everywhere.

“So in the United States your value as an individual is kind of measured by your distance from other people. In Bosnia and the Balkans and the Mediterranean circle, it is measured by the number of people you know. My mother, when I was a kid, she would always talk about her boss of the company she worked for, she said, ‘He’s a great man because he can talk to everybody’, this is how she would value him. And so I have this constant need for the presence of human beings. To me, living in the suburbs is just hell. Just walking down the streets of Dublin, I cannot see enough of these faces. Bring them on! I want to see them all!”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.