Čovjek bez prošlosti

At the same time, this autobiographical mystification in which Hemon narrates the life of his alter ego Jozef Pronek is thematically based to a large extent on Sarajevo, Bosnia and SFR Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia from those times when it was not yet interesting to CNN.

Pronek's biography is told in the first person by his friends and/or eyewitnesses, and three separate parts can be distinguished. In the first, the narrator narrates about Pronek growing up in Sarajevo in the eighties, in the second, Pronek as a member of the Ukrainian minority finds himself on a scholarship in Kiev during the anti-democratic coup in Moscow, and in the third, Pronek is an immigrant to the USA who collects donations from house to house for Greenpeace. The novel ends with a Borgesian novel about the Russian "white" officer Yevgeni Pick and his adventures in Harbin and Shanghai at the beginning of the century.