The Lazarus Project

Shortly after I finished The Lazarus Project by Aleksandr Hemon, I saw that it had been nominated as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction.  The novel has also been included on this year’s list of contenders for the Mornings News’ Tournament of Books.  I don’t think that it will win the NBCC award (could be wrong), but I expect it do well in The Tourney.

The Lazarus of the title is the center of a century old mystery. In 1908 Lazarus Averbuch was allowed into the home of George Shippy, who later shot and killed Averbuck. The young Jewish immigrant was reportedly delivering a letter to Shippy, Chief of the Chicago Police, who claims that he suspected that the visitor was an anarchist with ill intent. The official story ends there, and the real events of the day remain unknown.  The historical mystery is eventually dusted off by another young immigrant in Chicago, Vladamir Brik.

Brik (from Bosnia and non-Jewish) found himself an unwitting American citizen. He was visiting the US when his country went to war, and he was unable to return to the former Yugoslovia.  Brik learned English well enough to get a job writing a weekly column for a Chicago weekly about his immigrant experience. His marriage to a neurosurgeon, complete with a no-nonsense Midwestern father-in-law, seals his fate as a US citizen.

Hemmed in by a diminishing prospects as a writer, a strained marriage, and a not too distant drinking problem, Brik is desperate for an opportunity to bring some purpose to his life.   He manages to land an arts grant from a Chicago foundation friendly to immigrant causes.   Money in hand, Brik sets out off for Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in search of the past and a little breathing room from his present.  I’m trying not to reveal too much of the story, but most of this happens fairly close to the beginning.

Over the rest of the book, Brik and his traveling companion, a Serbian photographer named Rora, search for clues to Averbach’s pre-USA life. Their travels take them to places where the memory of Jewish families and the pogroms that sent them fleeing to foreign lands are quickly being forgotten and new tragedies take their place.

While traveling, Brik’s mind often wanders, and he imagines the pieces of Lazarus’s story.  In his imaginings, characters seem to repeat in the parallel lives of Lazarus and Brik, reinforcing their connection.  How much of Lazarus’s story is true is an open question.

There are so many stories that could be told, but only some of them can be true.

The photographs presented in the book also connect the stories.  Historical photos of Lazarus are presented in the book, including one of a deceased Lazarus posed in a chair by the police as a photo-op for newspaper photographers.  The old photographs remind the reader that Lazarus is real, even if Brik’s account of him is not.  The historical pictures are interspersed with gloomy contemporary photos that remind the reader that our age is not all rainbows and unicorns.

It bears mentioning that as Brik’s life is a mirror of sorts for Lazarus’s story, so too does Brik’s life reflect that of  the author Hemon.  Hemon is Bosnian, and he was stranded in Chicago when his country went to war.  He traveled Eastern Europe to research this book with a fellow Bosnian, a photographer named Velibor Bozovic.   Hemon’s grant came from the McArthur Foundation (the “genius” grants).  Do you see a pattern?

With a name like Lazarus, it’s to be expected that themes of life, death, the soul, and re-birth are explored from all angles, literal and figurative. And they are.

Every time, you think maybe this here is a different world, but it’s all the same: they live, we die. So here it is again.

This is the kind of book that gets you thinking and keeps you thinking well after you’re done.  This review is already longer than most that I write here, and I could easily have made it twice as long.  Somehwere, a graduate student has begun writing a thesis on this book.  I’m rethinking my opening, and I’m picking The Lazarus Project as a dark horse to beat Bolano’s 2666 for the National Book Award.  It could happen.

To do: Check out Hemon’s web site.  Click around for additional quotes from the book interspersed with Bozovic’s photographs.

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Other Links to this Post

1. Baby Got Books » Love and Obstacles — June 25, 2009 @ 8:52 am

2. Baby Got Books » Let the Great World Spin — March 2, 2010 @ 8:28 am

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