Nowhere Man
By Aleksandar Hemon
Picador , 242 pp, $40

The author of this series of linked stories was born in Sarajevo in 1964. In 1992 the increasingly bloody conflict in Bosnia caught up with him during a study tour of the United States. He settled there, polished his rudimentary English and in 2000 published a collection of short stories, The Question of Bruno, to critical acclaim.

Like Nabokov (with whom he has been compared) and Conrad, Hemon was a relative latecomer to English. His skill and virtuosity are therefore all the more remarkable. As in the earlier collection (now apparently unavailable in Australia), these stories reveal a near-breathtaking command of tone, idiom, allusion and self-reference. So much so that the brilliance threatens to go off the rails once or twice, which also happened with Nabokov at times.

The focus of Nowhere Man is Jozef Pronek , a young poet and rising rock musician from Sarajevo who found himself trapped in America in 1992. His adventures in the Land of the Free enliven the longest section of The Question of Bruno: a picaresque tale titled Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls, the Gogol allusion referring to the rock band Pronek and his friends started in Sarajevo before the civil war.

We first see Pronek in Chicago in 1994, at an English lesson where the class is trying to master the past perfect tense. "When I had been a little child, I had had a friend who had had a big head," one student proudly declares.

The second section tells us more about Pronek's childhood and adolescence, about growing up in what used to be Yugoslavia until Tito's death (which coincided disastrously with the projected debut of Dead Souls at a school dance) began to tear apart that fragile confederation.

Here Hemon conjures up, with ironic affection, images of a Bosnian sentimental education: the first stirrings of sexuality, petting sessions on park benches, the loss of Pronek's virginity and vignettes of bourgeois life in a soft-communist society. And then, in 1992, Pronek boards a plane for America. As it climbs into "the bright starless sky, he already cannot remember what happened yesterday".

The rest of Nowhere Man swings back and forth in time, affording glimpses of a puzzled Pronek in Kiev in August 1991 around the time of the anti-Gorbachev coup (he has a brief encounter with George Bush snr), and working for Greenpeace in Chicago a few years later. He enjoys a brief stint as a private detective's sidekick, trying to monster a hapless Chicago Serb for alimony payments. And in one section, he translates a letter from besieged Sarajevo into spectacularly idiosyncratic English.

Wide-eyed and bumbling but with a shrewd instinct for self-preservation, Pronek is a true child of Mitteleuropa. In some ways he is a descendant of the good soldier Svejk . In others he represents a more recent phenomenon: the millions who managed to survive in communist Eastern Europe but were left bemused, often stranded, when those regimes fell apart.

Nowhere Man (its Beatles-inspired title comes from the last section) is a fine book. The qualities that made The Question of Bruno so remarkable are all in evidence. Yet much of this new collection is a little less compelling. In some respects, Hemon is crossing familiar territory. And there are signs that this brilliant writer is showing off, striving to dazzle with his ingenuity in a recently acquired language. One story is peppered with far too many Shakespearian quotations. In another, "a jury of pigeons" proves a nicely apt phrase, but it was not a good idea to repeat it several times.

I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from reading Hemon. It's just that I found The Question of Bruno more varied and more absorbing. So please, can we have it back in the bookshops?

Andrew Riemer is the Herald's chief book reviewer.