Customer Reviews

The Book of Lazarus

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Mr. Grossman's last novel should change our reading habits: despite its - at firts glance - strange and complex structure, it is a story about how we deny the right to the past to be more than a parallax effect. It engraves our so-called linearity in an ever-changing form, in order to open our eyes: the world is made of voices, and each voice creates its own world. To enter these worlds, one has to be stripped naked of all conventions. This is a great novel, for all those who read Vollmann, Danielewski, D. Cooper.

Grossman's The Book of Lazarus follows a subverted pattern of character surround, in which Grossman forces the reader into a superb spectral analysis of how each character will eventually fall prey to the sinister underworld connections of Mitchell O'Banion. O'Banion's daughter, a compelling character who leads the reader through a maze of political and intelligence countermands, becomes one of the last connected characters to perish. But her legacy and the path to get there create a unique and fresh contemporary novel, whose photographic reminisces to the dead (the actual book of Lazarus)fit well into the novel's scenic and dark forms. If not for a somewhat unrelated and stupendously unending political ramble at the end, this novel would own an integrity one rarely finds in contemporary novels.

I bought this book when it was first published and never got around to reading it. After I read it, I was amazed and shocked by the intelligence it took to put this piece of art together. Thinking about it now, I am still in shock that someone could put something together so smart and so ingenious. Buy this book and stick with it!

It's really great! It's really smart and compelling! It just make me want to lend it to all of my friends!!

I have been reading a lot of film and music books. One book of fiction definitely stands out for me: The Book of Lazarus. This book is published by FC2: a press that has been dormant for a while, and has published little of real interest except for Grossman's first book, The Alphabet Man, and a few other books of innovative style. I am not sure innovative style means anything anymore because very few are interested. It is a good thing that FC2 has focused their energies on a book like The Book of Lazarus. Most people think that innovative writing is just sloppy and boring. I think that at the end of the day FC2 can be described as a bunch of suburban academics, who think that S/M is radical, which is not, and collect academic welfare while maintaining their outsider status. People who think that S/M is radical are deluded. Like Kathryn Harrison, these people think that self-humiliation is like a form of enlightment. I think when people don't have sex anymore, they get into S/M.

The Book of Lazarus is so impressed in my mind that I can recall most of it fairly easily. It made that much of an impact. It is made up of pictures, manifestos, drawings, and poems. The basic story involves a group of 1960s radicals, possibly fashioned after The Weathermen, who decide to kidnap teh daughter of a mafioso. The ransom money is to be collected by the leader, Mitchell O'Banion, and given to the Black Panthers. The deal goes bad and all the members of the group are executed by the Mafia while the daughter is also killed. O'Banion comes back with the money and saves Bobby Lazarus, a poet and idealist, who survived the execution because the plastic bag covering his head, put there to suffocate him, was punctured. This book anticipated the interested in the mafia (The Sopranos) and the use of collage in fiction (House of Leaves).

O'banion and Lazarus leave the country and change their identities. They go to Washington, and the poet Lazarus becomes a crossing guard and eventually involved in a child molestation case. O'Banion changes his name to Mitchell Finkelstein, and betreys his earlier political interests. He wages what becomes an ongoing battle with a Mafia family who Finkelstein had married into years before. We find out that he has a daughter living in Italy who he contacts near the end of his life. This is a great story about a group of radicals who are flawed as people. Their political idealism hardly saves them, and moeny corrupts them all. Richard Grossman has created a book which is an event, structured like a scrapbook, that emantes a new form of beauty. His characters are bad people wanting to be good, and have good in their lives, but they live in a world with salvation or transcendence. The only people who are good in this novel are those who gave their lives saving other people. Selfish motives go unrewarded. Richard Grossman is an important writer.

This is an example of cynical publishing tactics, in which a desperate pseudo-author is conditioned to think that his so-called real-life experiences are actually the subliminal text of the masses. In a heroic undervaluing of his emotions, the author, aided by skewered layout and typeface arrangements, manages to make a mess that suggests that everyone (desperate readers) could be a phoney-baloney post-modern author if they just collect their spit, and print. Please read late Latin authors. Language can be degraded, for it is more powerful than your expressions permit.