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| The Lazarus Project | 
 enlarge | Author: Aleksandar Hemon
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $8.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (10 reviews)
Sales Rank: 6032
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1594489882
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781594489884
ASIN: 1594489882
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-10 of 10 | | « PREV | | |
 Bubbles and pops with originality and humor May 29, 2008
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
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
 the lonely narrator May 27, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
 Disappointing May 25, 2008
4 out of 48 found this review helpful
Don't waste your money. Hemon has offered no new insights on the tragic events that led to the death of Lazarus Averbuch. For Hemon to compare his experience to Averbuch's is absurd and an insult to all immigrants who truly suffered in their new homeland. Hemon experienced none of the starvation, back breaking work and violent death that Averbuch did. Hemon is an elitist snob. I can't imagine him having the stones to survive on his own in the US had he not married an American, thereby escaping the status of illegal alien.
History Meets Fiction In The Balkans May 24, 2008
9 out of 14 found this review helpful
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.
Quirky, inventive, and rich May 3, 2008
62 out of 71 found this review helpful
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.
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