Aleksandar Hemon attributes his astonishing mastery of English (he arrived in America eight years ago with only a rudimentary knowledge of the language) to a job he had canvassing for Greenpeace in Chicago, the city that he now loves and calls home. "There was this period of intense speaking, producing words on the spot without rehearsing. I was not a person who enjoyed public discourse. I became a mature human being here, an older, and presumably wiser, person in English."

And Hemon has been good to English, as well, as the recent publication of his short-story collection, "The Question of Bruno," conclusively proves. It's a book full of peculiar and yet startlingly apt phrases ("the pungent, sneezeful greenness of green onions," for example). It's also a book of shifting, elusive moods, whether Hemon is writing about a childhood enthusiasm for the Russian master spy Richard Sorge; the sentimental, boozy expansiveness of a Bosnian family reunion; the absurd, horror of life in Sarajevo during the war; or the almost psychedelically vivid perceptions of a recent immigrant who sees American objects in starker relief partly because he doesn't know the names of any of them. Salon reached Hemon by phone at his home in Chicago, where he regards the publication of "The Question of Bruno" with unflappable aplomb.

You were writing fiction before you came to the U.S., but since your recent work is so much about loss and culture shock, I assume it must have been about something else. What?

It was some kind of minimalist shit. The stories were kind of pared down, a response to what was going on around me and so kind of nihilistic, too. They were not very good. A book of my short stories was supposed to come out [in Bosnia] in the summer of '92. Stopping that was the best thing the war ever did. They were a symptom of helplessness. There was so much overwhelming stuff around there was really no point in writing stories. They had this inherent meaninglessness that I couldn't overcome. One of them was about Kafka's death. It was dreadful. Here I was in my 20s writing about the meaning of life and death.

Is that something you think people in their 20s can't do?

I'm not sure we can ever really do it, but in the 20s one is inherently prevented from doing that.

How are your new stories different to you?

I'm happy with them because something has been resolved while I was writing them. I understood something writing these stories, even if 50 years from now they just look like babbling.

You have a close, almost obsessive attention to detail and to capturing the qualities of objects and places, which isn't surprising since you're often trying to hold on to a lost time and a lost world, particularly when you're writing about Sarajevo. Yet even when you seem to be yearning for the past, you tend to pick out things to describe that are gross, even disgusting.

Most people who are in a comfortable situation of having a continuous life, they imagine their lives in the best possible way, even if the objects in that life weren't exactly like that. But if you look at it closely, if you have to remember because if you don't things may disappear, you remember in a kind of panic and you don't know what may show up on the surface of your memory. People who have involuntary memories of things like child abuse -- I don't have that, but I'd bet they remember details very vividly. Smells and touches and textures. Something that doesn't allow them to remember it comfortably. There's a man pissing under my window right now.

That's like the kind of detail I was talking about.

He's also pushing an ice cream cart. Serendipity, the mother of knowledge.

When I remember my childhood, I remember being close to the ground. When we're kids we deal with those things because we're close to them. We have to be trained to recognize disgusting, abject things. My hands were dirty until I was 15, when I was taught that you don't touch earthworms. Well, maybe not 15. That's a little late. I still toy with them. Those were fascinating things because you're not supposed to touch them. There's this purification of life, including your own body. It becomes this clean, controllable object. All abject things about it, and by extension all abject things in the world, are presumably not supposed to be there. But if you want to remember the world, it's hard to do it without abject things.

There's a scene in your novella, "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls," where someone spills rotten spaghetti on the kitchen floor and it just stays there. While I was reading it, I had a nagging thought about when they were going to clean up the spaghetti.

That's exactly right, because in a clean, narrative life, all those messes are cleaned up. You have explained things to yourself, things about other people and about your own life. All the blotches are gone. I think American fiction needs more spilled spaghetti. At some point, fiction gets purified from abject moments and moments of spillage. And there's something so false about it, it becomes unbearable. The projection of life as either clean and pure, or if there are ugly little things, they're completely controllable and containable. Right now my apartment is a terrible mess, and I'd like to clean it but I'll never be able to because life always spills over.

You say you'd like to clean it, but you also must like it a bit.

Well, I have to like it. Otherwise, I'm screwed.

In your stories about living as an immigrant in Chicago, feeling almost invisible and the pain and loneliness of that experience is really palpable. But now that you're married and you've had some literary success, do you ever miss your old invisibility?

The advantage was you could watch without being seen. Watching without being seen is a privileged situation for a writer. But it's a question of how can I adjust my identity so I can still watch without being seen. It's a spy question. There are spies who surreptitiously watch other people, break through doors and crawl in the night. And there are spies who are in the sight of everyone but they don't know exactly who they are. There is always a spy fantasy that can help me!

What do you do now when you want to be unseen, go to places where no one knows you?

No, because at some level, you're always being watched. There are cameras in every store or the neighborhood watch. A large number of people here, I've found, have a need to roll down their shades at night because they think that they may be watched.

Do you do roll them up?

No, I just roll them up so I can see ... a man pissing under my window. But it's really how you behave as you know you are being watched, and anticipating the watcher's reaction. Some people might want to hide in some absolutely secure place, but I don't think that place exists. And even if you hide, there's nothing to hide ultimately. You're sitting in darkness.

Are you still as interested in spies as you were as a kid?

Yeah.

Is Richard Sorge still your favorite spy?

Yes, I guess you could call him my favorite spy. Do I have a list of some of my favorite spies?

Yes. Who are some of them?

Oh, what is his name? Actually he never got to be a spy because he was such a klutz that they caught him. What is his name? ... Miller.

That's my name!

No, no, no. In 1985 he was an FBI agent in San Francisco and he was consistently overweight, but somehow he passed all the physical exams and had an avocado farm with his wife and had eight kids and had to feed them. So he would sell Avon products out of his FBI car. Then he was seduced by some Russian woman who suggested he might earn a buck by spying for Russia. Once he forgot the key in the door of the FBI office in San Francisco! She took him to the Soviet consulate, which was the single most monitored object in the Western hemisphere, packed with FBI agents. So she left him in the car while she went to talk to the Russians, and while he was sitting in the car, they saw him. [Laughs] He got a double life sentence.

He's not exactly what I'd call a master spy.

No. He was someone who was such a klutz and he was at the center of the Cold War, mind you, and was completely wiped out by it. There are other spies. I like Sorge because he did it out of conviction. The Soviets normally controlled their spies, told them exactly what to do and how to do it. That was standard practice of the KGB. Whereas Sorge had free range. They'd send him to Shanghai and let him do whatever he wanted, and his information was first rate. But he was also an old-fashioned spy because he was a completely public person, a journalist, a bon vivant, drank a lot and was a womanizer. He would meet everyone and talk to everyone and people would come to him for information. His defense from being discovered when he was being watched at all times was to be visible at all times, but visible as someone else. He had a role he grew into.

My favorite detail about him isn't in the story [in my book]. When the German ambassador in Tokyo found out that there might be a spy at the embassy, he told Sorge, "There might be a spy here." And Sorge said, "Yeah, I know." I like that. It's remarkable how much spying is done in the light of the day and doesn't have to be surreptitious. A lot of the information Sorge got was from the newspapers and conversations, accessible to anyone who would pay attention. It was information anyone could get; it was just a question of how to organize it, which is a process remarkably similar to fiction.