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The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

ISBN13: 9781594489884
ISBN10: 1594489882
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

Awards

2004 MacArthur Fellowship

Staff Pick

Great literary style. Expressive, deeply moving, and insightful. Perceptively intertwines past and present.
Recommended by Adrienne, Powells.com

The Lazarus Project, Hemon's latest novel, is about storytelling, the nature of memory and reality, and America's relationship to the rest of the world, both past and present. It's blackly funny, crackling with intelligence, and populated by realistic, fascinating characters.
Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In two collections of stories, The Question of Bruno and the NBCC-finalist Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon has earned unmatched literary acclaim and a reputation as one of the English language as 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 shimmering — sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking — contemporary 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 Lazarusas story — what really happened, and why? In order to understand Averbuch, Brik and his friend Rora — who overflows with stories of his life as a Sarajevo war photographer — retrace Averbuchas 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.

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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"'The Lazarus Project,' the masterful new novel from the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, opens with a passage that recalls the invocations of epic poetry: 'The time and place,' Hemon tells us, 'are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908, Chicago. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain, and now I plunge.' Which muses Hemon invoked in writing this troubling, funny and redemptive... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) novel are not named, though one supposes that Clio, the muse of history, must have had some involvement, as well as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy. If there were muses of 'stolen cars and sadness' — his country's 'main exports,' according to Hemon — they would no doubt have played a role as well.

At the heart of 'The Lazarus Project' is a true story: On March 2, 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Eastern European Jewish immigrant and the survivor of an Easter 1903 pogrom in the village of Kishinev, knocked on the door of George Shippy, the Chicago chief of police. Their encounter culminated with Shippy shooting and killing Lazarus, whom he claimed was an anarchist.

Hemon imagines that a hundred years later, a non-Jewish Bosnian immigrant named Brik, who works in Chicago as a teacher and journalist, wins a grant to do research for a book on Lazarus. His plan, he says, is to 'follow Lazarus all the way back to the pogrom in Kishinev, to the time before America. I needed to reimagine what I could not retrieve; I needed to see what I could not imagine.'

To aid him in the 'seeing,' he enlists Rora, a photographer he knew in high school in Sarajevo who has also ended up in Chicago. Together, they set off on a surreal journey to Eastern Europe, a landscape of shifting frontiers in which criminal wealth feeds off poverty and 24-hour supermarkets crop up alongside outdoor markets. 'Men loitered at the street corners,' Brik says, 'offering sotto voce to sell me something very cheaply, which I refused even though I had no idea what it was.'

The structure of 'The Lazarus Project' is ingenious. Alternating chapters give us the story of Lazarus' killing (the story Brik is writing) and the story of Brik's own journey in search of Lazarus. Then, as the novel progresses, these narratives begin, eerily, to merge. Characters from Brik's life — or versions of them — show up in Lazarus' story. Even Brik himself makes a brief appearance. It's a conceit that Hemon justifies through a series of meditations on the idea of resurrection that Lazarus, by his very name, evokes. Art is resurrection, but so is history, a point that Hemon drives home when he notes (ruefully) the 1908 newspaper editorials bemoaning 'the weak laws that allowed the foreign anarchist pestilence to breed parasitically on the American body politic. The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror — funny how old habits never die.'

Brik's own war is with America itself. For him, America is a country in which 'belief and delusion are incestuous siblings,' in which 'the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth — reality is the fastest (growing) American commodity.' In a key moment, he recalls arguing with his wife, a surgeon, about the photos from Abu Ghraib. She sees in the photographs 'essentially decent American kids acting upon a misguided belief they were protecting freedom.' Brik sees 'young Americans expressing their unlimited joy of the unlimited power over someone else's life and death.' Eventually, Brik will find himself succumbing to that same heady cocktail, 'the lethal combination of wrath and good intentions' that leads to pleasure in brutality. Alas, by this point there is every suggestion that his marriage may be just one of the casualties.

Whether describing turn-of-the-century Chicago, with its mean tenements and decrepit outhouses, or the 'onionesque armpits' of a Moldovan pimp or an 'unreal McDonald's' in Moldova, 'shiny and sovereign and structurally optimistic,' Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: The novel is full of jokes and linguistic riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov. And though the prose occasionally lapses into turgidity ('Olga's stomach is churning and she would vomit if there were anything in it to disgorge'), these overwrought moments are more than made up for by the many gorgeous ones. (In the aftermath of the pogrom: 'The down from torn pillows floating, like souls, through the fog of what had just happened.') For beauty and violence, in Hemon's universe, are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, he seems determined not to let his readers (particularly his American readers) escape the experience of war as a personal affront and a personal transformation.

As Brik observes of the Moldovan woman who serves, in the novel, as a sort of gatekeeper of Jewish history, 'She would one day die, and so would Rora, and so would I. They were me. We lived the same life: we would vanish into the same death. We were like everybody else, because there was nobody like us.'

David Leavitt's most recent novel, 'The Indian Clerk,' is a finalist for this year's PEN/Faulkner Prize."

Reviewed by David Leavitt, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

"An extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary." The New York Times

Review:

"[A] novel worth reading with as much fire as its composition must have demanded." Library Journal

Review:

"The Lazarus Project takes a healthy swing at the all-inclusive, the gripping, at the truly audacious....Hemon's is a majestic talent.... His prose gets stranger and sharper as it goes, which seems right for such a journey: The guide gets more firm as the cave walls light up and the shadows enlarge. It's the kind of thing only a full-fledged talent can do." Chicago Tribune

Review:

"A profoundly moving novel....A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"Hemon can't write a boring sentence, and the English language (which he adopted at a late age) is the richer for it." Gary Shteyngart, The New York Times Book Review

Synopsis:

The much anticipated novel from MacArthur Award-winning writer Hemon is a story of historical sweep and contemporary insight crafted in a dazzlingly original style. Illustrated.

About the Author

Born in Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. His work now appears regularly in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hemon was awarded a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Riverhead will publish Hemon's next book, Love and Obstacles, in 2009.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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: Chris Horne, April 17, 2009 (view all comments by Chris Horne)
Mr. Hemon has taken the historical mystery of the death of Lazarus Averbuch in 1908 and created a rich novel around it. His fictional hero, Vladimir Brik, is lost in America culture and in his life, and decides to solve the mystery behind the circumstances of Lazarus' death. The name Lazarus is a methaphor for the author who himself left the Balkans in the civil war of the 1990's, for Brik and for the New Testament Lazarus. Mr. Hemon is clearly writing about his former homeland when Brik returns there to solve the mystery. This is not a murder mystery (though it functions as one) but the tale of a man seeking his salvation and meaning of his life through the completion of a quest.
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: bowierobert, October 23, 2008 (view all comments by bowierobert)
For the most part, an excellent, intelligent book. I have spent a lot of time in Russia (not in W. Ukraine or Moldova), and I notice that the descriptions of provincial towns are dead-on perfect descriptions of Russia provincial cities in the nineties: the crazy drivers, who take pride in NOT wearing seat belts, the whores in all the run-down hotels, the complaisant businessmen with their bodyguards, the general atmosphere of sleaze and vileness, everywhere. Hemon's strongest point is his flair for significant, often gorgeously expressed, detail.

The Bosnian complaints about America are typical of Russians as well, so I guess that Russian superstition overlaps Slavic superstition: the fear of drafts, the peasant notion of "limited good"--the Bosnians at the yearly dinner rush to scarf up the food, manifesting "the timeless feeling that plenty never means enough for all." The mention of "lethal brain inflammation" reminds me of Dostoevsky, whose characters are prone to that malady.

Hemon often writes superbly (the description of the Kishinev pogrom, e.g.), but sometimes he could use a good editor. There are sentences that are outright mistakes: "the baffling absence of draft in the United States" (12)--a typo? From what follows I guess this means "the baffling lack of fear of drafts in the United States."

He makes some stylistic mistakes that reveal his foreign origins: "Of these things I sometimes wrote" (also on p. 12), should be "have written." But, of course, these are the kinds of mistakes that Nabokov sometimes made, and Hemon, like the Great Nabacocoa, can write incredibly beautiful English prose.

The character of Rora, the photographer, is a conundrum. Deliberately intended, I suppose, to be enigmatic. But the best I can make of him is that he is a petty swindler and liar, and I was not particularly disturbed by his violent demise. I do realize that he is the embodiment of what the Russians call vran'e, which means lying/boasting as almost a way of life (again, this love of rodomontade appears to be typical of Slavs in general). He, apparently, has been inured to violence, his emotions deadened. All he has left to do is swagger around enigmatically, tell jokes, make up fantasies about the war, and take (bad) photographs.

As for using the photographs ("Rora's") in the book, I think that this was a mistake. The photos from the Chicago Historical Society are fine, but "Rora's" photos don't add anything to the book--in fact, they have no redeeming aesthetic value, and I can't figure out what they are doing in the book.

The theme of "degeneracy" was in the air in 1908, and not only in the U.S. Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), the famous Italian psychiatrist and criminal anthropologist popularized the idea that criminal types have certain physical features. Hemon does a good job of running with this theme throughout the book.

I like the story of Lazarus the emigrant, and how he was mistakenly taken for an anarchist and murdered. Way too much is made, however, of the brutality of the Chicago police, esp. in regard to Olga, the sister of Lazarus. The character of Olga is overwritten (overwrought), and too much is made of her sufferings. That is, her suffering, which is self-evident, does not need belaboring, but Hemon doth protest too much (having the policemen maul her and insult her incessantly).

Oddly enough, the most sympathetic character in the book is one who never appears in person: Mary, the American wife of the main character Brik. It sometimes seems as if the whole book has been written as an apology to her from Brik, for his failure to measure up to her standards. The book is saying something like, "Our marriage is over now, dear Mary, and the pain of that bare fact is excruciating." This is not apparent from the beginning, but by the time we get to the end of the book we are aware that a major theme is Brik's lamentation over his marriage.

The narrator Brik is, so he says, not a Jew, and when he gets "home," to Sarajevo, they don't recognize his name there either. He is obviously a "nowhere man," the eternal emigrant, who has found a new country (the U.S.), only to find fault (much much fault) with it; then he goes back to his old country and does not fit in well there either.

As for the name "Brik" I have come across it only once before. Osip Brik, who WAS Jewish, was a futurist poet in the USSR, husband of Lilya Brik, famous lover of the Soviet poet Mayakovsky. Don't know if Hemon was thinking of this when choosing the name.

I have read Hemon's two previous books, one of which was billed as a novel (although it was more like a compilation of stories). The Lazarus Project is really a novel, though, Hemon's first. Despite all the caviling that I've engaged in above, I think that it's a good novel.

Hemon, and his characters, are extremely angry. Does the anger enhance or detract from the aesthetic value of his works? This is a question for the litcrits.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9781594489884
Author:: Hemon, Aleksandar
Publisher:: Riverhead Books
Photographer:: Bozovic, Velibor
Photographer:: Chicago Historical Society
Subject:: General
Subject:: Immigrants
Subject:: Murder
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Historical fiction
Subject:: Chicago (Ill.) Social conditions.
Publication Date:: May 2008
Binding:: Hardcover
Grade Level:: General/trade
Language:: English
Illustrations:: Y
Pages:: 294
Dimensions:: 8.52x5.76x.98 in. 1.17 lbs.

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