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’s 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 Lazarus’s 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 Averbuch’s 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.
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.
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The Lazarus Project starts in medias res; "The time and place, 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." Aleksandar Hemon masterfully interweaves two stories in this book. The first and most gripping one is the killing of the young Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch. Lazarus escaped the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, only to get shot by the Chicago chief of police in 1908 (see the website of the Jewish historical society for some historical background). It is not clear why the young Lazarus was shot. What is beyond doubt, however, is that turn of the century Chicago was marked by civil unrest following the Haymarket riots. Xenophobia abounded and cool heads did not always prevail. Hemon sketches a very delicate and intimate portrait of the life of Averbuch's sister following the loss of her brother.
The second narrative is the contemporary story of Vladimir Brik, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe in Chicago. Almost a century after Lazarus,however, Chicago is a very different city. Vladimir is writing a story on Lazarus but the reader gets the impression most of his energy is dedicated to finding some peace with his newly acquired and very comfortable life in the US. Using some grant money, he decides to travel to Eastern Europe to shed some light on Lazarus's life before arriving in Chicago. Hemon also displays his skills in the second story, as a he lightens up Vladimir's despair and little idiosyncrasies with a lot of humor.
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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.
