The Lazarus Project, the masterful new novel from the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, opens with a passage that recalls the invocations of epic poetry...Alternating chapters give us the story of Lazarus's killing (the story Brik is writing) and the story of Brik's own journey in search of Lazarus. Then, as the novel progresses, these narratives begin, eerily, to merge. Characters from Brik's life — or versions of them — show up in Lazarus's story ...Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: The novel is full of jokes and linguistic riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov. And though the prose occasionally lapses into turgidity...he seems determined not to let his readers (particularly his American readers) escape the experience of war as a personal affront and a personal transformation.
Together with Rora, a fellow Bosnian and photographer, Brik sets out on a trip to Eastern Europe in search of Lazarus' past. They begin with the town in Russia where Lazarus was born and journey on, tracing the history of this pogrom victim and political refugee, interviewing people, but often simply imagining the past ... In his second novel, The Lazarus Project, MacArthur 'genius grant' winner Aleksandar Hemon (Nowhere Man) has undertaken the challenge of interweaving two narratives, one factual, another fictional. With the Lazarus story line, which is believed to closely follow actual historical events, he's done a convincing job ... On the other hand, the fictional Brik story line tends to meander, crammed with idle conversations, odd encounters and digressions into hazy memories of the past. Hemon, however, delivers a startling finish with a poignant twist ...he never writes a boring sentence.
Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project is one of several recent books that orbit these subjects. Its sentiments are all very correct and laudable, but as a novel it seems to me largely a failure. It opts, initially, for the oblique angle... Period reconstruction clearly isn't Hemon's game... What seem to interest him more are the various practical and metaphysical questions raised by his own desire to tell the story. The result is a familiar postmodern construction: a novel about the writing of a novel ...Lacking the pressure of a plot, these passages stake everything on their pure interest as writing ... Tired observations, lame jokes, bits of generic travelogue about smelly buses and scary taxi-rides form the bulk of these sections ... Towards the end The Lazarus Project seems to realise it's running on empty.
His death became a flash point for left and right, and the truth around it remains smoked in mystery ... The result of the journey is The Lazarus Project, a novel about a man named Brik, a writer from Bosnia now living in Chicago, who takes his friend, Rora, a photographer, on a trip to retrace Lazarus' path ... Hemon places his narrative on two tracks: Lazarus' story weaves in and out of Brik's — two very different immigrant experiences ... Though his story and Lazarus' provide dramatic contrasts, there's an off-kilter sway to the narrative as the tone flips between dark humor and the brand of sorrow you can't joke your way around ... The parallel protagonists of this book are separated by more than just a century.
A similar sense of the indefensibility of bloodshed underlies Aleksandar Hemon's stunning new novel, The Lazarus Project. The book opens on March 2, 1908, but the date could be a century later ... Hemon has always drawn on his own experiences in fiction, and Brik's quest has a real-life counterpart ... In the book at least, the search is not merely for the facts of one man's life, but for more complex truths about life and death, hope and despair, love and hate ... Hemon's characters eschew the notion that truth is tidy, or literal ... The most faintly drawn character in this otherwise vivid novel, Mary is a cut-out of a successful American woman... Her flatness is part of the point: Our narrator is falling out of love with a Midwesterner whose limited experience prevents her from comprehending evil.
Stories. True stories, false stories, good stories, rotten stories. Everything in Hemon’s beautiful new novel trembles within this matrix, where a story’s force or charm is at least as significant as its veracity ... Brik is a restless Bosnian immigrant in Chicago, dark with survivor guilt for having fortuitously missed the siege of his home town, Sarajevo: like Hemon himself... he[Brik] applies for a grant to research the 1908 murder of the Moldovan immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by Chicago’s chief of police ... it’s obvious from the start that this was a race killing, the dispatch of a suspicious-looking foreign ‘anarchist’ by a vicious cop answering to no one. It’s almost the only thing in the story that doesn’t cry out for examination.
Hemon’s cunningly ambitious new novel, The Lazarus Project, is a further installment in his autobiographical fictionalizing ... The fragility of the immigrant’s status takes on a metaphysical cast in Hemon’s work ... It alternates chapters describing Brik’s travels with chapters imagining Lazarus Averbuch’s existence in the early twentieth century. It is both a historical fiction and an inquiry into the limits of historical fictionalizing ... Hemon wants us to see the connection between the treatment of anarchists and immigrants in 1908 and the treatment of vulnerable groups now, even at the cost of making this parallel very . . . parallel ... Lost, homeless on two continents, Brik is poignant, and the novel is never more moving than when its narrator seems a little unhinged because a little unhoused.
The narrator is Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-American writer, and the spine of the story is his quest, almost a hundred years later, to unearth the truth about the death of Averbuch ... Hemon finds a story big enough to contain and structure his extensive repertoire of fiercely held obsessions, which include, in no particular order, Bosnia, America, identity, history, young men’s friendships, death, resurrection, the nature of evil, storytelling, the impossibility of truth, the siege of Sarajevo, old photographs, the absence of God, violence, war, fraud, and espionage ...echoes create a layered density and arouse a sense of interconnectedness among the novel’s story lines ... Brik is a naturalized American, but Hemon is far too sophisticated to suggest that the US represents an antidote or corrective to so much corrupt history ...the fearless and spirited expression of a turbulent literary talent and, at the same time, a cold, fierce blast of moral outrage.
The book’s title makes itself an obvious choice as the two parallel narratives unfold: one shadows Vladimir Brik, an expatriated Bosnian living in Chicago under the pall of the war on terror; the other makes fiction of a historical event, the 1908 killing of Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by the Chicago chief of police ... What both narratives share in common is the fact that home is not a place one can always return to, or find it easy to create elsewhere ... Using newspaper clippings and imagination, Hemon’s examination of the circumstances resulting in the death of Lazarus... On a grander scale, this inability to connect the dots, or even discern them, speaks to the development of the American experiment during the early 20th century... The lively writing makes for a vivid read that casts a glaring light on the horrors of pogroms and the Bosnian War and what was left in their wakes.
Brik, a modern newspaper columnist and Bosnian immigrant, becomes fascinated with this true story and decides to uncover more of its censored history ... Complementing this narrative is a constant throwback to Olga in1908, also trying to solve the mystery of Lazarus’s death ... Aleksandar Hemon absolutely nails the atmosphere of 1908 Chicago, showing with an impressive economy of words the scope of what has changed and what has remained the same ... His prose bubbles and pops with originality and humor — one-liners convey whole images and extended descriptions hone in on single moments. His dialogue manages to be completely naturalistic while also conforming to his stylized traveler/historian/Bosnian road trip aesthetic ... But witty paradoxes like this make up the soul of the text, which goes beyond the typical story of the immigrant experience into larger questions of how to find one’s home, and what to do when one gets there.
...begins in the Chicago of 1908, when a 19-year-old Jewish refugee named Lazarus Averbuch undertakes a mysterious mission to deliver a letter to the city’s chief of police ... When he attempts to deliver the letter, the chief shoots him, fearing that the stranger is an armed anarchist. A reporter who serves as a mouthpiece for the police spreads the word that the murdered immigrant was actually a murderer, killed in an attempt to assassinate the chief ... Chapters alternate between Brik’s account of the events of 1908 and his current research into the truth about Lazarus, a mission that takes him back to Eastern Europe on an extended journey, accompanied by an amoral former war photographer named Rora ... A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality.
