Bookreporter.com - THE LAZARUS PROJECT by Aleksandar Hemon

THE LAZARUS PROJECT
Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead Trade
Fiction
Hardcover: 9781594489884
Paperback: 9781594483752

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

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