The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

The Barnes & Noble Review

The Lazarus who lends his name to the title of Aleksandar Hemon’s third work of fiction was killed as a young man and mourned by his sister. And yes, this Lazarus did sort of rise weeks after his death (in a gruesome sense) and maintained an afterlife a century later as the inspiration for this novel. But don’t expect reverence or piety. Narrated by an avowed atheist who refers to a certain historical figure as "Mr. Christ" and "the crucified gymnast," Hemon delivers a fractured, furiously comic tale about the capacity for xenophobia to resurrect itself across multiple continents throughout the 20th century by people who believe they have divine permission to do so.

The man with the biblically resonant name was Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Jewish survivor of the Eastern European pogroms. On March 2, 1908, he appeared on the doorstep of George Shippy, then the Chicago chief of police, and handed him an envelope. What was in the envelope is not known. But what is known is that within minutes Lazarus -- who appeared to Shippy to be a Sicilian or a Jew, surely an anarchist -- was attacked by Shippy, his young son, and his driver and shot dead in the parlor by seven bullets.

Identifying an anarchist in 1908, it turns out, has little to do with establishing a man’s political affiliations and former whereabouts. This being the heyday of phrenology and eugenics, the detectives are more concerned with finding clues in the corpse itself. Averbuch’s good hygiene is taken as a sign of his ill intentions ("It is not customary for men of that class to take good care of their persons. It looks like he didn’t expect to come back."); his Jewish ethnicity is finally confirmed by a thorough examination of his crotch. In the final indignity, his body is put on public display, and the detectives begin rounding up suspects, identified by skin tone, facial features, and hair texture, whom they then put in stress positions (in the case of Lazurus’ sister, Olga) and beat mercilessly (in the case of his next-door neighbor, who dies from his injuries).

It’s not hard then, to see what might tempt a young artist to find parallels between the anarchist scare of the early part of the century and the war on terror in post-9/11 America. Enter Vladimir Brik, a young Bosnian-American writer suffering a curious kind of emasculated boredom in 21st-century Chicago. Although he writes a newspaper column meant to explain his former country to Americans, Brik is more or less supported by his Irish-Catholic brain surgeon wife. And though his status as a former citizen of Bosnia gives him survivor’s cred amongst Americans, he, like Hemon, left the country in 1992 and witnessed little of the war itself. This, he feels, gives him second-class status when he encounters Bosnians who did live out the war, as we find out when he encounters his former high school friend Ahmed Rora at a party:

I knew from experience that if I -- I who had left just before the beginning and missed the whole shebang -- were to ask a Bosnian about the war, my question could easily lead to a lengthy monologue about the horrors of war and my inability to understand what it was really like. I was self-trained to avoid falling into that situation, but this time I asked:

Were you in Sarajevo for the whole siege?

No, he [Rora] said. Just for the best parts.

This meeting inspires Brik to apply for a small writing grant (obtained through flirting with the 70-something wife of a local philanthropist who, coincidentally or not, shares a last name with the assistant investigator on the Averbuch case) to journey to Eastern Europe, ostensibly to retrace Lazarus’ steps back to his hometown. He convinces Rora, a photographer, to accompany him. For the rest of the novel, Hemon alternates chapters re-imagining the story of Lazarus with sections tracing Brik and Rora's journey through Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and finally Bosnia.

Here we get Hemon at his tragicomic best: His descriptive eye lurches between the absurdity of Ukrainian Madonna karaoke singers, Orthodox Darth Vader impersonators, a businessman "with a tenderloin breaking out of his tight jeans," and a young girl "in a short, glittery skirt utterly unbefitting the idyllic catastrophe of [her] village." The narrative tension between humor and horror becomes especially keen as Rora unspools his own stories about his apprenticeship to a Bosnian warlord dubbed Rambo, whose theatrical means of dispatching with his enemies suggest he fancied himself the star in a Hollywood version of his life. Rora, a charmer -- "in my country, charmers used to be as endemic as landmines are now," Brik tells us -- seems to milk these tales for their entertainment value, though as they get closer to their former homeland, it becomes clear that even telling them may have real-world consequences for both men.

As the trip progresses, from the city in modern-day Moldova where Lazarus barely survived the pogroms towards Bosnia, the site of mass murders nearly a century later, Brik -- and the reader -- struggle for a way to account for nothing less than a working theory of mass murder, torture and genocide. Are these the acts of people whose good intentions go awry? Or do atrocities exist precisely because those who commit them convince themselves that they are acting on their own best intentions? To illustrate these two views of history Brik recalls an argument he had with his wife over the photos taken at Abu Ghraib. Mary, who as a surgeon has her own private view of death, sees "essentially decent American kids acting upon a misguided belief they were protecting freedom." Brik, instead, sees "young Americans expressing their unlimited joy of the unlimited power over someone else’s life and death" -- then goes on a rant, smashing dishes and railing against "the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave" and tells her she is "no different than those angelic American kids who plug curly-haired people into an electric current after a relaxing water-boarding session." In a phrase that bodes ill for more than just his marriage, he tells us, "the baggage I dragged around the Eastern lands contained the tortured corpses of our good intentions."

The novel includes photographs documenting the Lazarus case procured from the Chicago Historical Society, as well as photographs of Eastern Europe taken by Hemon’s best friend, Velibor Bozovic, on a trip the two took in 2004, partially funded with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. After reading this novel, the images that seem most innocent are the most unsettling. One, of a terrier, opens a chapter that ends with a drunken couple torturing an animal for their own amusement. The other depicts the elegant foyer of an overstuffed Victorian living room. It’s Shippy’s, of course, where soon a puddle of blood will spread "like an obscure ocean on the light maple floor." But it’s also reminiscent of the cozy, bourgeois safety of the Averbuchs’ living room (as Hemon describes it) -- family gathered round, kasha on the stove -- right before their former friends and neighbors break through the door with the intent to slaughter them. One might also imagine a similar scene, played out over and over again in modern Sarajevo living rooms throughout the 1990s. Hemon, like Brik, may not have been there to bear direct witness. But he resurrects the horror in his prose with the awful ring of truth. --Amy Benfer

Amy Benfer has worked as an editor and staff writer at Salon, Legal Affairs, and Paper magazine. Her reviews and features on books have appeared in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, The Believer, Kirkus, and The New York Times Book Review.

From the Publisher

On March 2, 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, was shot to death on the doorstep of the Chicago chief of police and cast as a would-be anarchist assassin.

A century later, a young Eastern European writer in Chicago named Brik becomes obsessed with Lazarus's story. Brik enlists his friend Rora-a war photographer from Sarajevo-to join him in retracing Averbuch's path.

Through a history of pogroms and poverty, and a prism of a present-day landscape of cheap mafiosi and even cheaper prostitutes, the stories of Averbuch and Brik become inextricably intertwined, creating a truly original, provocative, and entertaining novel that confirms Aleksandar Hemon as one of the most dynamic and essential literary voices of our time.

The New York Times Book Review - Cathleen Schine

Some writers turn despair into humor as a way of making the world bearable, of discovering some glimmer of beauty or pleasure or, most important, humanity. In contrast, the gifted Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon has taken the formal structure of humor, the grammar of comedy, the rhythms and beats of a joke, and used them to reveal despair. His new novel, The Lazarus Project, is a remarkable, and remarkably entertaining, chronicle of loss and hopelessness and cruelty propelled by an eloquent, irritable existential unease. It is, against all odds, full of humor and full of jokes. It is, at the same time, inexpressibly sad.

The Washington Post - David Leavitt

The masterful new novel from the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, opens with a passage that recalls the invocations of epic poetry…Which muses Hemon invoked in writing this troubling, funny and redemptive 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…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…these overwrought moments are more than made up for by the many gorgeous ones.

New York Times

An extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary.

Los Angeles Times

[With The Question of Bruno] Hemon proved himself as inventive as Nabokov or Salman Rushdie. He seemed, in other words, to possess the kind of bold talent that doesn't come around very often. And in his follow-up book, Hemon again displays his prodigious gifts—nearly every sentence of this novel is infused with energy and wit. . . . A true original.

Esquire

Now here's a reason to get excited: a true work of art that's as vast and mysterious as life itself. This tender, devastating book is evidence indeed that Hemon is a writer of rare artistry and dept.

Publishers Weekly

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 Tribunereporter 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. (May)

Stephen Morrow - Library Journal

After two short story collections (The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man), MacArthur Award recipient Hemon brings us a novel worth reading with as much fire as its composition must have demanded. The New York Timesrightfully calls Hemon "not simply gifted but necessary." Reading Hemon's image-viscous prose is like anxiously wading through dark emotion. It's the story of Brik, who fled to Chicago from Sarajevo during war, married a neurosurgeon, and became a writer. Obsessed with the story of Lazarus Averbuch-an Eastern European immigrant who was murdered in 1908 in Chicago, five years after escaping the pogroms-Brik returns with photographer friend Rora to Eastern Europe to immerse himself in his and Lazarus's old lives. Through Rora's stories of wartime Sarajevo and glimpses of Brik's life, we understand their outsider anguish in America. Also, through flashbacks of Lazarus's death, Hemon reveals the other mystery. This story could be compared with Jonathan Safran-Foer's Everything Is Illuminatedin that it's one character's Eastern European search for enlightenment. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

A profoundly moving novel that finds striking parallels between the America of a hundred years ago and now, as an immigrant Bosnian author, straining to come to terms with his identity, returns to his troubled homeland. The second novel by Hemon (Nowhere Man, 2002) begins in the Chicago of 1908, when a 19-year-old Jewish refugee named Lazarus Averbuch undertakes a mysterious mission to deliver a letter to the city's chief of police. He has made the trek from his impoverished ghetto home to one of the city's richest neighborhoods and is plainly out of his element. When he attempts to deliver the letter, the chief shoots him, fearing that the stranger is an armed anarchist. A reporter who serves as a mouthpiece for the police spreads the word that the murdered immigrant was actually a murderer, killed in an attempt to assassinate the chief. A hundred years later, the incident piques the interest of Vladimir Brik, a struggling writer whose column for the city's alternative weekly has given him a readership but not much of a career, and who relies on the financial support of his wife, an American brain surgeon. Occasionally mistaken for being either Jewish or Muslim-though he is neither-Brik sees the demonizing of Lazarus in a contemporary light: "The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror-funny how old habits never die." Chapters alternate between Brik's account of the events of 1908 and his current research into the truth about Lazarus, a mission that takes him back to Eastern Europe on an extended journey, accompanied by an amoral former war photographer named Rora. Yet as the novel progresses, it seems that Brik is more concerned with finding the truth abouthimself-Who am I? Where is home?-than he is with the perhaps impossible task of learning what really happened with Lazarus. A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality. Agent: Nicole Aragi/Aragi Inc.

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