Customer Reviews

The Lazarus Project

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

With "The Lazarus Project," wordsmith and Sarajevo-born Aleksandar Hemon takes the real-life, early 1900s murder of a Jewish American at the hands of the Chicago police - the chief of police, no less - and uses it as a point of departure to explore his own immigrant identity. The resulting work of fiction then cuts back and forth between the more engaging, true-crime storyline and the modern-day events, which see Hemon researching the Lazarus tragedy. The murder and its aftermath are constantly interrupted by Hemon's own postmodern shenanigans until it gets buried beneath lots of - to borrow one of Hemon's own phrases - "metaphysical abuse." Hemon's stand-in narrator resorts to the usual self-reflexive narrative tricks and employs the standard self-deprecatory humor, along with a heavy dose of self-loathing. And, as usual, it all ends with a moment of renewal and redemption, thanks to the power of storytelling. (Hemon wanders dangerously close to Amy Tan territory.) It's a pity that the talented writer didn't tell the story straight because he clearly did his research. In fact, he has an irritating tendency to quote verbatim long passages from real newspaper clippings, even when describing the contents of a room or crime scene. Couldn't Hemon have used his own words? Even the photographs, some of them actual shots from the early 20th century, that precede each chapter start to seem like a narrative crutch to build mood and atmosphere.

Following is a beautiful (in my mind) passage that gets to the heart of "The Lazarus Project:"

"We reached Bucharest by the afternoon. We crept through the messy, unintelligible city, through the narrow streets that opened into vast boulevards that climbed up toward an insanely enormous building. Seryozha circled around an oval building that was plastered with billboards: Sony, Toshiba, Adidas, McDonald's, Dolce & Gabbana. The young, beautiful, white-faced supermodels looked down on the streets from their unimaginable worlds, implying blatantly better lives to the riffraff presently pushed around by Seryozha's fearless vehicle."

The image of "unimaginable worlds" captures the essence of this dream-like novel. The novel follows two threads. The first is the journey of a Sarajevo-born, Chicago-based writer who travels to Eastern Europe and ponders deeply (and poetically) about his own disassociation with America. The second is the story of the young man (19 years old) named Lazarus Averbuch. Lazarus (and this second part is all based on a true story) was a Jewish immigrant escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe in 1908. Lazarus was shot and killed by Chicago's chief of police inside the chief's home.

It's the writer's curiosity about Lazarus and what happened that propels "The Lazarus Project" as the writer, Vladimir Brik, heads to Europe to uncover the young man's history and roots. Brik brings him with a photographer and the two men encounter Bosnia today, rough and rugged and brutal. Brik is supported on his mission by a grant. He's supposed to produce a book. (I've read a few interviews with the bright and engaging Hemon; clearly Brik is Hemon's alter ego.)

So Brik heads off with no heavy deadline or intense feeling of obligation; he drifts and imagines and wonders if he's doing the right thing. He wonders about his marriage to a highly-regarded neurosurgeon. Okay, he wonders about most everything and processes what he sees in a quite poetic way. At one point, Brik ponders the choices before him this way:

"The book would make me become someone else, go either way: I could earn the right to orgasmic selfishness (and the money required for it) or I could purchase my moral insurance by going through the righteous processes of self-doubt and self-realization."

Brik looks for the places where Lazarus was raised, probes for the moods and attitudes that existed at the time--and ultimately finds those moods and attitudes to be timeless. He's looking for loss and he doesn't have to look far.

In one interview I read Hemon says he pursues a "trance-like" quality to his writing. If that's his goal, he has succeeded quite well.

Recommended for readers who enjoy thoughtful, earnest fiction and don't need easy answers or easily-wrapped endings.

One hundred years ago, a young man named Lazarus Averbuch, a Bosnian Jew and new immigrant to Chicago, knocks on the door of George Shippy, the Chief of Police. He is shot dead, accused of anarchist ties thanks to attending lectures by Emma Goldman. His wife Olga is forced to pick up the pieces alone: to find some solace and justice for Lazarus, to survive as a widowed woman, and to manage the ethnic tensions of living in a city with little tolerance for Jews, unwelcome immigrants and heterodox politics.

Brik, a modern newspaper columnist and Bosnian immigrant, becomes fascinated with this true story and decides to uncover more of its censored history. Feeling generally displaced by the path of his life, an uneager participant in an alienating marriage, he jumps at a grant that would allow him to travel and research both Lazarus's heritage and his own. Not to say he has particularly strong ties to Bosnia, but he capitalizes on the project to supplement his only half-hearted sense of immigrant otherness: "Just like everybody else, I enjoy the unearned nobility of belonging to one nation and not the other; I like deciding who can join us, who is out, and who is to be welcome when visiting."

So off to Bosnia! In the hopes of finding some "home," to lay down any firm ties (be they Bosnian or American), Brik travels with Rora, his decidedly Bosnian friend and tour guide. The original purpose of the trip --- a fact-finding expedition to Lazarus's hometown --- is soon left behind as Brik visits sites from his childhood and elsewhere in order to escape his American life and find something resembling a cultural identity. Rora is more or less like every oh-so-Eastern-European local, with an alien sense of humor and street-smart sensibility most recently incarnated in Jonathan Safran Foer's EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. While certainly the most stereotypical character in the novel, Rora's jokes and stories from his war reporting career brilliantly pepper Brik's already bizarre road trip. Rora and Brik's exchanges are both wildly comedic and deeply poignant as Brik gains some sort of understanding, even if he doesn't like what it is.

Complementing this narrative is a constant throwback to Olga in 1908, also trying to solve the mystery of Lazarus's death. Through brief imagined letters to her mother and conversations with Lazarus's friend hiding in an outhouse from the police, she is forced to come to terms with the fact of her immigrant otherness. This portion of the novel is told in a disarming present tense that makes even its historical parts come to life. 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.

At the heart of both these stories is Hemon's incredible sense of style. 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. And in his non-narrative passages, there is the perfect amount of reasonable self-consciousness to complement the seriousness: "What I like about America, I said, is that there is no space left for useless metaphysical questions. There are no parallel universes there. Everything is what it is, it's easy to see and understand everything." This claim rings both true and unbearably false, as Lazarus's, Olga's and Brik's experiences demonstrate. 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.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

This book was original, absorbing and yet confusing. Billed as being the story of Lazarus Averbuch, murdered by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908, and the research journey a century later of a writer, Vladimir Brik, planning to write Lazarus' history, it evolved into many more stories than those two.
I had expected something like "the devil in the white city" with a chapter to each story, but instead, the two stories become intertwined, sharing chapters, switching stories from paragraph to paragraph. To add to my confusion, some of the names are the same in 1908 and 2008. For example, the Chicago Tribune reporter in 1908 is called Miller, as is a journalist who features prominently in the third story in the book. Similarly, the police investigator in 1908 (Schuettler) is the same name as the person who can give grants to writers in 2008.
The third story is that of Vladimir's friend, fellow-traveler and photographer Rora, who joins Vladimir on his research journey through the post-Communist states of Europe looking for Lazarus' history. Rora and Vladimir knew each other in Sarajevo prior to the war, but Rora stayed behind and his adventures (which may or may not be imaginary) form the third narrative of the book. Rora also livens up the book with periodic jokes about the legendary Bosnian character Mujo and his reaction to impossible situations. As a fourth story, Vladimir describes his own history, and meeting with his American wife and the state of their marriage. And finally, I found it very difficult to separate the author himself from the character of Vladimir Brik, as the book itself was obviously the result of the journey, and seems very autobiographical.
Having listed all that confusion, however, the fact is that it worked well, if you read it at a stretch. Putting it down and coming back to it was more problematic for me, in that I had to try to remember where I was - am I in Ukraine 2008 or Chicago 1908? I really liked the Chicago 1908 bits - the evocation of the lot of immigrants and the whole atmosphere of fear of anarchy that was going on at the time was splendidly described. The author has created a very believable history of how Lazarus lived through the pogroms in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, found his way to Chicago and then ended up a victim of the Chief of Police, and almost a symbol of both the anarchist movement and the born-again Christian movement (who are interested in having him seen to be born again, due to his name). The journey through the modern states of Ukraine, Moldova, through to Bosnia is quite sad, showing people making money any way they can, and in some ways reflecting back to 1908 where people did the same thing.
A very original book, and well worth a read.

"Nothing at all depends on you seeing it or not seeing it."
Oh yeah! Take that, epistemologists! That line is part of a harangue from the inveterate self-mythologizer Rora to the obsessive nagging-questioner Brik, as they putter around the cafes of Chisinau, Moldova. Rora is the photographer whom Brik has recruited to accompany him on his "research" into the background of Lazarus Averbuch, a real historical personage, an immigrant who was shot to death by the Chief of Police in Chicago in 1906. The scarce facts about the Averbuch slaying are embedded in author Aleksandar Hemon's invented account of the historic event, which is in turn interspersed in the first-person narrative of Brik's voyage of self-discovery, which is 'larded' with Rora's tall tales of his own escapades in war-torn Bosnia. Brik is himself an immigrant from Bosnia, now married to an American brain-surgeon and aspiring to write the Great Immigration Novel based on the fate of Lazarus Averbuch. The four narratives bounce and jostle each other throughout this book as unpredictably as the indivisible quarks of a quantum tangle. It's up to the reader to square them in his/her perception, to assemble them in her/his readerly memory like the squares of a Rubik's cube. Believe me, both the excitement of solving the puzzle and the exhilaration of contemplating the finished artifact are worth the concentration required.

Perhaps the clearest way to review this book is to offer some samples of Hemon's quirky, acerbic prose. Here's what Brik says that he said about his first impression of Chisinau:
"At the far end of Stefan Cel Mare, within sight of an atrociously Soviet-looking building, there arose an unreal McDonald's, shiny and sovereign and structurally optimistic. It was a fantastically recognizable sight, therefor exceedingly heartening.
What I like about America, I said, is that there is no space left for useless metaphysical questions. There are no parallel universes there. Everything is what it is, it's easy to see and understand everything."
This is in fact a bizarrely ironic statement from Brik, the incessant metaphysical questioner. And that irony raises the question of the relationship of fictional Brik to his authorial creator Hemon. Their biographies are virtually identical, both non-Muslim Bosnians who came to America as tourists and got stranded by the outbreak of the civil war at home. The attitude of Brik toward all things American is ambiguous, leaning toward sardonic, pressing the reader to question just how much Brik's unresolved love/hate detachment -- his inability to become truly Americanized -- represents Hemon's own dilemma or Hemon's perception of the dilemma of Immigrants All.

This IS a novel of immigration, written by an immigrant in the immigrant's adopted language. Many of the best American novels have been novels of immigration, for patently obvious reasons: "The Bread Givers", "Call It Sleep", and "Chromos" are other very fine novels written by immigrants who learned English as adults. But "The Lazarus Project" is also a Novel of Return; most of Brik's and Rora's scenes take place in the "former Yugoslavia" and the "former USSR", and the book amounts to a ferocious depiction of the failures of Communism and the disasters that followed the fall of Communism. If you suppose that such a book must be "over-ambitious", you are basically correct. "The Lazarus Project" is ambitious to the point of elephantiasis. The wonder is that it succeeds in staying readable; a large part of its readability is its pervasive self-mockery, its sarcastic brilliance. Hemon takes on the most immense political and philosophical issues with charming impertinence.

I had already read and relished Hemon's earlier books - his collection of stories titled "The Question of Bruno" and his autobiographical novel "Nowhere Man". This multi-leveled "Lazarus Project" is his strongest offering to date, but I don't think he's reached his peak yet. I predict a few years of struggle, resulting in, yes!, the Great American NOVEL of Immigration! At least I have hopes. For the time being, Hemon is easily one of the most exciting writers the USA has fostered in recent decades.

While it doesn't exactly possess the most exciting subject matter or narrative style out there, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project is the rare book that manages to defy literary conventions while remaining firmly grounded in the real world and telling a coherent story (two, in fact) to boot. Starting with a real historical event--the 1908 shooting death of a young Jewish immigrant and pogrom survivor named Lazarus Averbuch under disputed circumstances in the home of the Chicago police chief--Hemon's story quickly sprawls out in all sorts of directions, defying easy description as it folds in upon itself and absorbs multiple story threads in the process. The aftermath of Lazarus's death, with his sister Olga left to fend for herself, his fellow Jews hounded and villified, and Lazarus himself labeled an anarchist assassin and denied a proper Jewish burial, serves as an occasion for Hemon to examine the uneasy relationship the United States has long had with its immigrant populations and anti-establishment political movements. Following his speculative retelling of Lazarus's shooting, Hemon joins his story to that of Vladimir Brik, a married Eastern European writer living in present-day Chicago who becomes fascinated with Lazarus and returns to Eastern Europe to delve into both Lazarus's roots and his own. Linking two separate narratives by such a tenuous thread is a move most authors probably wouldn't dare try, but to Hemon's great credit he keeps both plots moving along even while pursuing different aims with each.

Those strongly opposed to introspection and navel-gazing in their novels would probably be well-advised to look elsewhere, as much of Brik's half of the book is laden with his ruminations on subjects ranging from the state of his marriage to the religious beliefs of his in-laws and his own family, but at least no one could accuse Hemon of being a slave to formula. Besides, The Lazarus Project quickly establishes Hemon as a prodigiously gifted writer, able to make a description of a death-defying high-speed car trip through Eastern Europe as harrowing and immediate as that of a brutal pogrom. The story itself is a decidedly unique mix of fact and fiction, taking a real event as its basis but quickly expanding its focus to encompass times, places, events, and thoughts that are only tangentially related to the shooting death of a Jewish immigrant in 1908 Chicago. Whether describing a Chicago laden with poverty and class struggle or an Eastern Europe teeming with gangsters and prostitutes, Hemon shows a keen insight into human nature and a knack for wordplay that rivals that of the late, great David Foster Wallace.

In a well-executing balancing act, Hemon turns the story of Olga Averbuch's attempt to navigate the difficult days after her brother's death into both a wrenchingly personal tale of loss and grief and an unvarnished snapshot of the American political landscape of 100 years ago. If Hemon's goal in retelling the aftermath of Lazarus's death was to illustrate how little (if at all) human nature has changed in the last century, he's done a more than commendable job. Much like Dennis Lehane's also-excellent The Given Day, The Lazarus Project takes readers through an early-20th century urban landscape where mutual mistrust, guilt by association, and a with-us-or-against us mentality rule the day. Not surprisingly given the focus of the story, Hemon's sympathies seem to fall largely with Olga and her fellow impoverished immigrants, but he does also manage to capture the very real fears of foreign ideologies that overtook the country at the time. Depending on one's perspective, the assistant police chief who relentlessly pursues the case against suspected subversives after the shooting and the Chicago Tribune writer who covers the pursuit in a fashion completely devoid of ambiguity or doubt could come off as either noble heroes or hopelessly naïve capitalist dupes, which is a testament to the moral grayness that covers much of the book.

Back in the 21st century, the book sees Brik embarking on the titular project along with Rora, a fast-talking, vaguely mysterious ex-war photographer whom Brik know back home and meets back up with in Chicago. In spite of the nominal purpose of their visit, thoughts of Lazarus are generally kept in the background as Brik and Rora's voyage becomes part buddy/road-trip comedy, part self-examination (for Brik anyway) and part exploration of their native region's volatile history and bleak present. Hemon makes up for the relative lack of narrative thrust in Brik's story by populating it with memorably humorous incidents and colorful characters, none more so than Rora himself, a practically larger-than-life figure whose exaggerated experiences, penchant for deception, and prodigious appetites make him a worthy counterpart to his more subdued traveling companion. The jokes, asides, and stories of questionable veracity that fill the trip eventually become as important as its ground-level view of 21st-century Eastern Europe (the references to Jesus as "Mr. Christ," for one, never stop being funny).

Suitably, the two parallel stories are told in starkly contrasting voices, with Brik's enjoyably sardonic, digression-laden first-person contrasting with the more narrowly-focused and matter of fact third-person (with occasional breaks for hyperbolically patriotic and anti-subversive Tribune editorials) that characterizes the Averbuchs' unfortunate story. The feeling of being a stranger in a strange land that pervades both stories and provides an important thematic link, as Olga Averbuch struggles in a new homeland that's not quite hers, while Brik surveys an ancestral homeland that bears little resemblance to his adopted one. Neither story comes to a particularly expected conclusion, but in a book this resolutely non-formulaic that's not exactly a disappointment. I definitely won't be holding my breath for the movie version.

Judging from the praise this books has gotten, I thought it would be a marvelous read. However, i felt let down. First off, Hemon is not the linguistic stylist that critics deem him to be. He can be clever and cutting, but there's nothing there to rival Joseph Conrad (who one critic compared him to). The book follows a Bosnian-American writer named Brik,living in Chicago, who wants to research the life of one Lazarus Averbuch, a poor immigrant who dares to ring the doorbell of the Chicago chief of police on an early morning in 1908.
The chief guns Averbuch down, thinking him an anarchist, but anti-semitism probably played a large role.
Brik, eager to get a research project going, gets a hold of some grant money and takes off for Ukraine and Bosnia to research the life of Lazarus. It's difficult to fathom whether he finds any answers, however. He does discover some of the horrifying conditions that the Averbuch family endured during the Russian pograms, and he does learn about Lazarus' life as a Jew. (Brik himself is not Jewish.) However, much of the narrative involves fantasy-like scenes of Lazarus' life in Chicago and Europe and it's impossible to tell if they are the product of Brik's research or of his imagination.
As the book moves on, it devolves into strange reverie, until Brik unravels completely, and the book never comes to a satisfactory ending. The true Lazarus is never found. For this reader, it leaves a bothersome sense of unfinished business.