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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
132 of 142 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quirky, inventive, and rich,
By
This review is from: The Lazarus Project (Hardcover)
It must be both thrilling and anxiety-provoking for a young writer to find himself compared to Nabokov, Conrad and Rushdie with only one novel and a short story collection to his credit. Aleksandar Hemon, descendant of Ukrainian emigrants to Yugoslavia and a native of Sarajevo, Bosnia, arrived in Chicago for a 1992 visit just ahead of the Balkan war. It took him only three years to begin publishing stories in English, eight to issue his first book and 12 to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant."Aside from the trick of writing in a non-native language, Hemon's not quite in a class with Nabokov and Conrad just yet. But there's no doubt he's become a fluent writer in English, and one that uses the language to unique and pleasing effects. Parallel plots concern the brief life of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jew and recent East European transplant who escaped a pogrom in Moldova only to be mistaken for an anarchist and shot down at 19 by Chicago Police in 1908; and Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian writer with Ukrainian roots who travels to the Ukraine and Sarajevo to research a book on Averbuch as well as his own ancestry. This story is enlivened by Bosnian and Jewish jokes, and crucial catchphrases that grow in resonance with each reprise: "Home is where somebody notices your absence"; "I am just like everybody else because there is nobody like me in the whole world." The novel also notes the parallels between the U.S. war against anarchism a century ago and its war against terrorism today, without belaboring them. The Lazarus Project is a story filled with death, despair, missed connections and aching ironies, that somehow manages to be full of humor and hope -- a neat trick whose secret must lie somewhere in Hemon's skilled use of his adopted language.
35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
the lonely narrator,
By
This review is from: The Lazarus Project (Hardcover)
I initially disliked this book: a bit too self-indulgently Artsy with the proliferation of photos and the repetition of imagery (enough with the cans of sardines, already!). But, as you progress through this novel, the true beauty comes out -- and that is in the creation of a narrative voice that is self-aware, self-deprecating, occasionally annoying and almost cataclysmically alone. It is a brilliant study of displacement and solitude, of yearning for and ambivalence towards "home." And a fascinating view on the implications of "storytelling" in all its forms.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A surprise,
This review is from: The Lazarus Project (Hardcover)
I don't write reviews often, but I felt compelled to do so for this book . As said before, the Lazarus Averbuch affair is interwoven with a strange modern-day odyssey into various cities in Eastern Europe in search of answers. What's really special about this book and what made me really crazy for it was the language. Read it and see for yourself. Some expressions and phrases are so effective and so original that they made the narrative many times more colorful than it already is.
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