The Lazarus Project

Very seldom have I encountered a novel as disappointing as this one. The book ostensibly offers an enticing mystery along two parallel tracks: (1) a young immigrant named Lazarus is shot under odd and vague circumstances in 1908, and (2) one hundred years later, Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian living in Chicago, decides to do research into this murder and heads back to Eastern Europe to find some truth. The author has set the table for a brilliant historical mystery. Will Brik be able to uncover this mystery? Are there ties between the 1908 murder and Brik? Is there some dark trans-Atlantic secret that still survives to this day?

The answers are no, no, and no, respectively. Evidently there is no mystery to begin with, Brik's final intersection with Lazarus (or rather, his relatives) barely lasts five pages, and the eerie black-and-white photos in the book are just filler. The entire parallel track with the 1908 murder is simply a crutch to bring Brik back to Europe. The author could have easily distilled the book into its purest form: "Eloquent European chap, after years of anglocisation, becomes disinterested in America and travels back to Eastern Europe to rediscover himself. News at 11." That's it. That's all there is to the book.

This overwhelmingly poor lack of closure and convergence unfortunately detracts from the author's beautifully-written prose. Furthermore, there are small interesting facets of the book, such as the juxtaposition of our current holy war on terrorism and the 1900s' holy war on anarchism, but such positive points are drowned out by a deluge of bad jokes (of all things). On a more upbeat note, I will look forward to the author's next release.

In summary, I am rather severely disappointed by this book. I would prefer to give this arthouse work 2.5 stars, but truncation compels me to give it 2.

"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.

"The time and place are the only things I am certain of" are the opening sentences of Aleksandar Hemon's strangely beautiful "The Lazarus Project", a novel that moves back and forth in time to build up its narrative. Since English is not the author's mother tongue, but he has a master command of the language, he has often been compared to Nabokov.

Being a non-English native speaker is not the only reason to bring Hemon and Nabokov in the same sentence. Both writers deal, at some point, with the immigrant experience, with the not belonging that surrounds "The Lazarus Project" double narrative. This subject, though, also brings Hemon closer to another great writer, the great late German W. G. Sebald - whose most notable work tackles the same subject. But if it the subject matter was not enough to link these two writers, the photograph would.

Sebald was innovative not only because he illustrated his narratives with real pictures - photographs that, actually, bring something to the narrative, to the readers' experience, and not only to make the book look nice. What made his literature worthwhile was his urgency, his sense of contemporaniety of handling a matter that is in debacle specially in Europe. His approach is hardly the economical one, but specially the one dealing with the identity of a person who leaves his or her country and moves to another one.

Hemon main characters - there are two in "The Lazarus Project - are forced to leave their countries and move to the United States. There is a narrative inside a narrative in this novel. Brik, a young Bosnian who lives in Chicago, writes about Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant who was shot to death by the police for no apparent reason - afterwards, police plotted he was a communist, therefore a menacing.

Who was Lazarus? And who is Brik? These are questions we should have in mind while reading the novel. The Lazarus name works both for the character and a metaphor as the Bible's Lazarus - a man who Christ raised from the death. Both of them have a sister who will fight for their integrity.
Each chapter of "The Lazarus Project" are opened by a picture either from Chicago Historical Society or taken by Velbor Bozovi'. The add not only a sense of image, but they do enhance the narrative, since, they are supposed to be by one of the characters - a Bosnian photographer living in the USA that travels back to Eastern Europe with Brik.

In his third book, Hemon displays an assurance that some old timers do not have. His prose is beautiful, but his tackling is more important. He brings an old story about intolerance and connects it to the contemporary USA making "The Lazarus Project" as beautiful as relevant.

According to Hemon, Lazarus was resurrected, raised from the grave by a prophet and part-time miracle worker called J. Christ and went on to live in Marseilles. Hemon is an avowed atheist who cleverly weaves various acts of resurrection into this kaleidoscopic novel about alter ego (?) Brik, a Bosnian refugee from Sarajevo and struggling writer in Chicago, researching the death by police bullets there in 1908 of Lazarus Averbuch (LA), a young Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, and its cover-up.
About 100 years later, Brik, whose granddad arrived from the Ukraine in Bosnia with his parents aged 8, secures a grant and decides to find out more about LA in Eastern Europe, but not alone. He talks fellow exile and Sarajevo schoolmate Rora into joining him. Rora is a scion of an old, influential family, a story-teller, wisecracker, Muslim, coffee addict and compulsive photographer. And a chancer who thrived during the siege of Sarajevo, the start of which Brik missed by weeks because of a short visit to Chicago. Rora is also Hemon’s and Brik’s best material witness to write about what they missed from this blatant feat of European inaction.
The novel switches constantly between Brik’s puerile draft on Lazarus, his sister Olga and ugly 1908 newspaper reports about often Jewish immigrants with anarchistic leanings, and the pair’s travels and field research. A renewed surge of populism in press and politics may have prompted Hemon to write this book. Their Odyssey sheds light on reasons for wishing to live somewhere else: violence, stagnating economies, corruption, impunity, organized crime incl. human trafficking.
What do migrants or refugees experience when they reach a host country? This is perhaps the main theme of this novel, expressed confusedly and eloquently by Brik himself. “Home is where someone notices your absence”, he says more than once. He comes across as a negative person, wounded, unkind, anxious, opinionated, scornful about religion, his wife’s work ethic and parents, what not…
Aleksandar Hemon deftly wove personal names and words into a fabric of sorts across time and space by repeating e.g. s***, sardines, candy, armpit, flying carpet, home, etc. I acknowledge its deeper messages, but also hate the miserable way he ended this book.

Its not that it was bad its just that I wanted to punch myself while reading it to make sure I hadn't died of boredom while reading it. That being said I did finish it so it couldn't have been too bad. Better than Moby Dick not as good as other books I have read.

The Lazurus Project is a semi-auto biographical account by Aleksandar Hemon, an immigrant from Sarajevo who arrived with a smattering of English, but remarkably wrote his first story in English within two years of arriving in the US.

The Lazarus Project is his third novel. It has earned critical acclaim, along with a clutchful of nominations establishing Alexsander as a credible literary talent.

The Lazarus Project follows the lives of two immigrants; Lazurus, who in the early 1900's, traveled from Eastern Europe to America to escape religious persecution, carrying with him the hopes of his family, and the author who retraces Lazurus's trip to war-torn Balkans. The two stories are interwoven but much of the narrative it taken up by the author`s present-day journey to Sarajevo. The travelogue across the Balkans blighted by war reminds the reader that almost a century later the religious extremism and hatred that forced Lazurus to flee, still remains. But the book is not about the depressing landscape. Instead the focus is on the gruff, prickly friendship between the writer and his photographer-friend Rora; their minor spats and the vernacular jokes makes the story a pleasure to read. The story is narrated in an unmistakably foreign accent, but one that effortlessly establishes the time and place of the events. The mellifluent lilt of the narrative makes for an absorbing read.

Taken as a whole, the Lazurus Project is a remarkably accomplished novel that defies genre and appeals to a broad audience.

This book tried to be clever and went into all kinds of metaphysical territory trying to be clever and deep, but it was so poorly written, and the characters were so shallowly created that I ended up not caring enough about them to remember them from era to era. The main character was mainly pathetic because he didn't care about anything to exert enough inertia to create change or energy. His puns and wordplay were stupid. I finished this book only because I try to finish everything I read. I was glad when I was done. Waste of time and money, in my opinion!

I liked this book better than I thought I would from the reviews but also did not find it particularly compelling. Their are two parallel storylines: the main character is a Bosnian immigrant living in the US working on a book about Lazarus, a Jewish immigrant himself who was murdered by the police in the 19th century for being an anarchist. The main character journeys to Europe to follow Lazarus's trail, taking with him an old Bosnian friend who's main role is tell stories. In his journey, he reveals his own character flaws and his struggle to leave behind his past while also unveiling the truth behind Lazarus's death and the impact on Lazarus's sister of that death.

No one comes out looking particularly good except Lazarus. While both stories were somewhat interesting it was difficult to understand how they were linked.

Aleksandar Hemon engages the reader with an inventive story told within a story. Some of the best books I've read leave room for the reader to consider the story, and come to his/her own conclusions. The Lazurus Project is such a book. It stays with you long after you've finished it. It is the kind of book you can come back to, to reconsider a passage. Recommended!