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Summary
Summary
In two collections of stories, The Question of Brunoand the NBCC-finalist Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon has earned unmatched literary acclaim and a reputation as one of the English languageÂs most original and moving wordsmiths. In The Lazarus Project, Hemon has turned these talents to an embracing novel that intertwines haunting historical atmosphere and detail with sharp and shimmeringÂsometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreakingÂcontemporary storytelling. On March 2, 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a recent Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe to Chicago, knocked on the front door of the house of George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police. When Shippy came to the door, Averbuch offered him what he said was an important letter. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him. When Shippy released a statement casting Averbuch as a would-be anarchist assassin and agent of foreign political operatives, he all but set off a city and a country already simmering with ethnic and political tensions. Now, in the twenty-first century, a young writer in Chicago, Brik, also from Eastern Europe, becomes obsessed with LazarusÂs storyÂwhat really happened, and why? In order to understand Averbuch, Brik and his friend RoraÂwho overflows with stories of his life as a Sarajevo war photographerÂretrace AverbuchÂs path across Eastern Europe, through a history of pogroms and poverty, and through a present-day landscape of cheap mafiosi and cheaper prostitutes. The stories of Averbuch and Brik become inextricably entwined, augmented by the photographs that Rora takes on their journey, creating a truly original, provocative, and entertaining novel that will confirm Hemon once and for all as one of the most dynamic and essential literary voices of our time.
Author Notes
Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo. He lives in Chicago.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
MacArthur genius Hemon in his third book (after Nowhere Man) intelligently unpacks 100 years' worth of immigrant disillusion, displacement and desperation. As fears of the anarchist movement roil 1908 Chicago, the chief of police guns down Lazarus Averbuch, an eastern European immigrant Jew who showed up at the chief's doorstep to deliver a note. Almost a century later, Bosnian-American writer Vladimir Brik secures a coveted grant and begins working on a book about Lazarus; his research takes him and fellow Bosnian Rora, a fast-talking photographer whose photos appear throughout the novel, on a twisted tour of eastern Europe (there are brothel-hotels, bouts of violence, gallons of coffee and many fabulist stories from Rora) that ends up being more a journey into their own pasts than a fact-finding mission. Sharing equal narrative duty is the story of Olga Averbuch, Lazarus's sister, who, hounded by the police and the press (the Tribune reporter is especially vile), is faced with another shock: the disappearance of her brother's body from his potter's grave. (His name, after all, was Lazarus.) Hemon's workmanlike prose underscores his piercing wit, and between the murders that bookend the novel, there's pathos and outrage enough to chip away at even the hardest of hearts. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lazarus Averbuch, a recent immigrant and survivor of the infamous Kishinev pogrom, tries to see Chicago's chief of police early on March 2, 1908, but he is shot to death before he can state his mission. The powers-that-be finger the undernourished young Jew as an anarchist and harass his seamstress sister, Olga, as part of a brutal cover-up. So begins MacArthur fellow Hemon's third and most galvanizing work of fiction. The basic story of Lazarus' murder is true, and Hemon tells it with vigor and outrage, covertly paralleling early-twentieth-century anti-Semitic hysteria over anarchists with early-twenty-first-century stereotyping of Islamic terrorists. Powerful stuff, and yet just one facet of a remarkably trenchant novel. Vladimir Brik, a struggling Bosnian writer living in present-day Chicago, decides to write about Lazarus and embarks on a grant-funded research expedition with photographer Rora. The two endure ludicrous, risky, and wrenching adventures in long-tyrannized Moldova and Sarajevo, and Hemon, a gloves-off heir to Nabokov, riffs audaciously on the biblical Lazarus, venomously condemns gangsterdom, and praises those who hold on to their humanity in the maelstrom of genocide. Charged with fury and empathy, Hemon's sentences seethe and hiss, their dangerous beauty matched by Velibor Bozovic's eloquent black-and-white photographs, creating an excoriating novel of rare moral clarity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
This novels hero is obsessed with an immigrant who died in 1908. SOME writers turn despair into humor as a way of making the world bearable, of discovering some glimmer of beauty or pleasure or, most important, humanity. In contrast, the gifted Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon has taken the formal structure of humor, the grammar of comedy, the rhythms and beats of a joke, and used them to reveal despair. His new novel, "The Lazarus Project," is a remarkable, and remarkably entertaining, chronicle of loss and hopelessness and cruelty propelled by an eloquent, irritable existential unease. It is, against all odds, full of humor and full of jokes. It is, at the same time, inexpressibly sad. Hemon, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," has written two previous books in English, his second language: a collection of surprising, giddy stories, "The Question of Bruno," and an irresistible, darkly charming novel, "Nowhere Man." Like many of the characters in these works, and like Hemon himself, the hero of "The Lazarus Project" grew up in Sarajevo, came to Chicago on a visit and was forced to stay in the United States when war broke out in what was then Yugoslavia And yet, while the new novel is in some ways a continuation of Hemon's vision of an immigrant's slanted, postmodern world, its narrator, Vladimir Brik, is also a departure from the ironic yet naïve young men of his earlier books. This is a mature novel about a grown man who is animated by and indeed savors the nuances of disappointment. In one scene, Brik tiptoes into his Chicago kitchen to make coffee before his wife wakes up. "I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES." Brik is married to a successful American neurosurgeon who saves lives from "her high position of surgically American decency." He, on the other hand, struggles "through permanent confusion." Living with an acute sense of the loss of his homeland and, so, the loss of his identity, Brik has become intrigued with another immigrant: Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jew who escaped the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in what is now Moldova and came to Chicago. Averbuch is a historical figure whose story is still something of a mystery. But it is known that he arrived at the house of the Chicago chief of police on March 2, 1908; there was some kind of scuffle, and the young man was shot and killed. Still haunted by the anarchist Haymarket riots, in which seven police officers died, and fearing a violent reaction to the mayor's cancellation of a speech by Emma Goldman, Chicago moved into a state of xenophobic hysteria. The parallels between this period and the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, are clear as Hemon moves back and forth between Lazarus's story and Brik's attempt to tell it. Hemon's painful, tender portrayal of Lazarus's sister is heightened almost unbearably by archival photographs of his skinny, gentlelooking corpse. Seeking a grant to write a book about Lazarus, Brik clearly identifies not only with the dead man but with the biblical Lazarus. For Hemon, that biblical figure is just another immigrant an exile from death rather than Yugoslavia. Using dear, distinct, almost journalistic prose, Hemon describes his narrator's hazy, trancelike state of being, in which dreams, memories, death and a lifeafterdeath intermingle. Trying to remember the events of the day before falling asleep, Brik engages in a ritual he calls his "nightly prayer, a contemplation of my presence in the world." But sometimes, he confesses, "a violently involuntary memory of a dream emerged in my mind, like a corpse released from the bottom of the lake." In this one eerie, watery image, Hemon suggests the many ephemeral layers of disassociation from reality the morass of memory, lost memory, dreams and the death of dreams in which Brik exists. This constant sense of a living, permeated loss is partly what impels him to try to uncover the story of Lazarus Averbuch. Writing the book, he thinks, would be a way to define his increasingly drifting life. He isn't earning any money. He isn't committed to his marriage in the clean, hopefilled way his American wife is. He isn't, in fact, committed to anything. In one of the novel's many wonderfully unexpected phrases, he sees his situation as "moral waddling." "The Lazarus Project" is Brik's search for his moral stride. And that search is inextricably bound up in the how and why of storytelling. In Sarajevo before the war, Brik tells us, "everyone could be whatever they claimed they were each life, however imaginary, could be validated by its rightful, sovereign owner, from the inside. ... You could choose to trust his stories because they were good." For Brik the truth has little to do with the hopeful pursuit of facts he finds in his adopted country. Rather, it's suspended somewhere in the illogical logic of the comic mistake (the can of SADNESS), in the joke, in the absurd. The corpse of Lazarus Averbuch, in a 1908 photograph from The Chicago Daily News. When Brik finally gets his grant and takes off for Eastern Europe, following in Lazarus's footsteps, he brings an old friend along, a photographer and fellow Sarajevan named Rora. A consummate storyteller, Rora provides the jokes and anecdotes that run through the novel like melodic riffs of carefree disembodiment, of otherness, of bemused futility and unattainable truth. In one of them, Suljo comes to visit Mujo in America. Mujo picks him up at the airport in his big car and drives him to a big house. "See that house?" he says. "That's my house." He points to a swimming pool and a sexy woman sunbathing beside it. "That's my wife." "Very nice," Suljo replies. "But who is that brawny, suntanned young man massaging your wife?" "Well," comes the reply, "that's me." Rora and Brik's road trip is an Eastern European nightmare. They are driven to Bucharest by a somnolent pimp with a terrified young girl held captive in the back seat. In one chapter, set at a bordello hotel called Business Center Bukovina, Hemon constructs a delicate, beautifully rendered fable of ugliness, desolation and heartlessness: "The room smelled of my grandfather's death a malodorous concoction of urine, vermin and mental decomposition." They pass a mangy dog as they enter. The window looks out on a huge garbage bin "brimming with glass bottles," their sparkle providing a brief moment of pleasure: "I always like to see a full garbage container, because I relish the thought of emptying it, the complete unburdening implicit in it." At the end of the chapter, Brik hears a drunken couple shouting, then laughter, a dog howling and the shattering of glass. "The man and woman had thrown the dog in the garbage container full of bottles and then must have watched it writhing, shredding and slicing itself, trying to escape." There is to be no escape, no "complete unburdening" for Brik, no emptying of the life he has known and tried both to remember and forget. "Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever," he notes. When Brik and Rora finally reach Sarajevo, Brik discovers that Rora's stories are Sarajevo stories after all. And what of his own story? At the close of this richly stark and disturbing novel, Brik realizes that, a selfcreated Lazarus, he must begin to write it himself. Hemon's narrator is a man who is animated by and indeed savors the nuances of disapppointment. Cathleen Schine's most recent novel, "The New Yorkers," has just been released in paperback.
Guardian Review
The political catastrophe of Bush-era America has been vivid enough to penetrate even the rather placidly apolitical literary life. With the litany of horrors lengthening every day, it's hard to stay focused on your coming-of-age novel, your new poem about the fall foliage. War-on-terror subplots start sprouting; your maple-gazing dissolves into thoughts about Guantanamo . . . However, it's surprisingly hard to incorporate this material into the standard literary forms. Fiction and poetry have a way of making full-on indignation sound like self-righteousness, while a more oblique approach prompts the question: what is there to be oblique about with torture, rendition, vote-rigging? 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: in this case, historical analogy, along the lines of Miller's The Crucible , with the anarchist scare of the early 20th century forming its point of entry into the contemporary hysteria. In March 1908 a young Jewish immigrant to Chicago, Lazarus Averbuch, made an unannounced visit to the chief of police, George Shippy, at his home. Lazarus appears to have had little or no connection with the anarchist movement, and nothing more menacing in mind than the delivery of a letter. But in a blunderingly stupid over-reaction, Shippy took him for an assassin, and shot him dead. A brutal round-up of Averbuch's associates followed, along with beatings, public denunciations and the wreckage of innocent lives; all conducted in a frenzy of patriotic rhetoric about sinister people of Middle Eastern origin sabotaging the Land of the Free. The parallels with today are obvious, and one can see why Hemon was attracted to the case. But the drawing of parallels doesn't in itself make a novel, and once the reader gets the point (scraps of handwriting in Lazarus's pocket mistaken for coded terror instructions, and so on), the question arises of what else to do with the story. Period reconstruction clearly isn't Hemon's game: his turn-of-the-century Chicago is thinly sketched, stocked with throwaway caricatures of thuggish cops, humbly virtuous immigrants and pompously self-serving journalists. 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. Framing the historical material in a contemporary investigation, Hemon gives us Vladimir Brik, an emigre Bosnian newspaper columnist in Chicago, who has been awarded a generous grant to research Lazarus Averbuch. (Hemon himself is an emigre to Chicago from the former Yugoslavia, and the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" grant.) An old photographer friend from his Sarajevo days, Rora, suggests they take a trip together to Lazarus's birthplace, and the two set off for Ukraine and Moldova. The journey, intercut with the Lazarus story (and illustrated by some Sebaldesque photographs), gives Brik an opportunity to improvise on whatever subject he feels like talking about - war, history, America, his unravelling marriage, the blighted landscapes and seedy hotel rooms they pass through - and to relay his companion's yarns about war-torn Sarajevo, while intermittently musing on Lazarus and dreamily transferring images from his own life into that of his subject. Lacking the pressure of a plot, these passages stake everything on their pure interest as writing. Hemon has shown himself capable of writing well in previous books - some of his short stories are particularly impressive - but a pall seems to have fallen over him here. Tired observations, lame jokes, bits of generic travelogue about smelly buses and scary taxi-rides form the bulk of these sections. You could make an anthology of mediocre prose and stale routines from them. There's the sub-Amis car-name punning: "The Ford Focus smelled of feces." There are lengthy tracts of what Adrienne Rich famously called "bullshit eloquence", as in this little maelstrom of verbal registers and half-cocked notions: "Never mind Mr Christ's eschatological circus - there must be the post-orgasmic moment of absolute peace, of coming home, the moment when the fog of life floats away like gun smoke and everything is finally nothing." There's the annoying mannerism, as in the repeated use of "but" in its archaic sense: "the narrative went completely haywire and I became but a confused character within it". And so on. As that last quote suggests, a part of the problem may be the lack of a powerful governing idea. The two pals go to a casino, they visit a Jewish centre, traipse through a cemetery, drink coffee, encounter prostitutes and thugs, but there's little sense of what Hemon really wants from these scenes; almost no feeling of a situation or theme being interestingly advanced. There's also a tendency for action to be presented at one remove or more from reality. Brik's marriage, which preoccupies him greatly, occurs entirely offstage, which makes its demise a matter of little interest to the reader; likewise Rora's adventures during the Sarajevo siege, which have the further disadvantage of seeming both untrue and unconnected to anything else in the book. Towards the end The Lazarus Project seems to realise it's running on empty. Nervous jokes about its narrator's self-absorption begin to appear. And as if desperate to break out of its own muffled torpor, it becomes suddenly sensationalistic. There's an ill-judged attempt to "do" the Kishinev pogrom, which manages to be both inadequate and overwritten. And then, out of nowhere, Brik and Rora turn into knights errant, punching out a sex-trafficker in a Bucharest toilet. How random, as my kids would say. Hemon's two previous books were justly praised. I had high hopes for this one. It's been ages since I felt this disappointed. James Lasdun's most recent novel is Seven Lies (Vintage). To order The Lazarus Project for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-lasdunhemon.1 The parallels with today are obvious, and one can see why [Aleksandar Hemon] was attracted to the case. But the drawing of parallels doesn't in itself make a novel, and once the reader gets the point (scraps of handwriting in Lazarus's pocket mistaken for coded terror instructions, and so on), the question arises of what else to do with the story. Period reconstruction clearly isn't Hemon's game: his turn-of-the-century Chicago is thinly sketched, stocked with throwaway caricatures of thuggish cops, humbly virtuous immigrants and pompously self-serving journalists. 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. Hemon has shown himself capable of writing well in previous books - some of his short stories are particularly impressive - but a pall seems to have fallen over him here. Tired observations, lame jokes, bits of generic travelogue about smelly buses and scary taxi-rides form the bulk of these sections. You could make an anthology of mediocre prose and stale routines from them. There's the sub-Amis car-name punning: "The Ford Focus smelled of feces." There are lengthy tracts of what Adrienne Rich famously called "bullshit eloquence", as in this little maelstrom of verbal registers and half-cocked notions: "Never mind Mr Christ's eschatological circus - there must be the post-orgasmic moment of absolute peace, of coming home, the moment when the fog of life floats away like gun smoke and everything is finally nothing." There's the annoying mannerism, as in the repeated use of "but" in its archaic sense: "the narrative went completely haywire and I became but a confused character within it". And so on. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
A profoundly moving novel that finds striking parallels between the America of a hundred years ago and now, as an immigrant Bosnian author, straining to come to terms with his identity, returns to his troubled homeland. The second novel by Hemon (Nowhere Man, 2002) 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. He has made the trek from his impoverished ghetto home to one of the city's richest neighborhoods and is plainly out of his element. 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. A hundred years later, the incident piques the interest of Vladimir Brik, a struggling writer whose column for the city's alternative weekly has given him a readership but not much of a career, and who relies on the financial support of his wife, an American brain surgeon. Occasionally mistaken for being either Jewish or Muslim--though he is neither--Brik sees the demonizing of Lazarus in a contemporary light: "The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror--funny how old habits never die." 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. Yet as the novel progresses, it seems that Brik is more concerned with finding the truth about himself--Who am I? Where is home?--than he is with the perhaps impossible task of learning what really happened with Lazarus. A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Hemon resurrects Lazarus Averbuch, an Eastern European Jew shot to death by Chicago's chief of police while attempting to give him a letter, by telling the story of a contemporary Eastern European immigrant fascinated with Averbuch. With a five-city tour and reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
