The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar
Hemon
Past And Present In A Foreign Country
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: America has a richer literary
landscape since Aleksandar Hemon, stranded in the United States in 1992
after war broke out in his native Sarajevo, adopted Chicago as his new
home. He completed his first short story within three years of learning to
write in English, and since then his work has appeared in The New Yorker,
Esquire, and The Paris Review and in two acclaimed books, The Question
of Bruno and Nowhere Man. In The Lazarus Project, his most ambitious
and imaginative work yet, Hemon brings to life an epic narrative born from
a historical event: the 1908 killing of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old
Jewish immigrant who was shot dead by George Shippy, the chief of
Chicago police, after being admitted into his home to deliver an important
letter. The mystery of what really happened that day remains unsolved
(Shippy claimed Averbuch was an anarchist with ill intent) and from this
opening set piece Hemon springs a century ahead to tell the story of
Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-American writer living in Chicago who gets

funding to travel to Eastern Europe and unearth what really happened. The
Lazarus Project deftly weaves the two stories together, cross-cutting the
aftermath of Lazaruss death with Briks journey and the tales from his
traveling partner, Rora, a Bosnian war photographer. And while the novel
will remind readers of many great books before it--Ragtime, The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Everything Is Illuminated--it is a masterful
literary adventure that manages to be grand in scope and intimate in detail.
Its an incredibly rewarding reading experience thats not to be missed.
--Brad Thomas Parsons
Personal Review: The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
"The time and place are the only things I am certain of" are the opening
sentences of Aleksandar Hemon's strangely beautiful "The Lazarus
Project", a novel that moves back and forth in time to build up its narrative.
Since English is not the author's mother tongue, but he has a master
command of the language, he has often been compared to Nabokov.
Being a non-English native speaker is not the only reason to bring Hemon
and Nabokov in the same sentence. Both writers deal, at some point, with
the immigrant experience, with the not belonging that surrounds "The
Lazarus Project" double narrative. This subject, though, also brings Hemon
closer to another great writer, the great late German W. G. Sebald - whose
most notable work tackles the same subject. But if it the subject matter
was not enough to link these two writers, the photograph would.
Sebald was innovative not only because he illustrated his narratives with
real pictures - photographs that, actually, bring something to the narrative,
to the readers' experience, and not only to make the book look nice. What
made his literature worthwhile was his urgency, his sense of
contemporaniety of handling a matter that is in debacle specially in
Europe. His approach is hardly the economical one, but specially the one
dealing with the identity of a person who leaves his or her country and
moves to another one.
Hemon main characters - there are two in "The Lazarus Project - are
forced to leave their countries and move to the United States. There is a
narrative inside a narrative in this novel. Brik, a young Bosnian who lives in
Chicago, writes about Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant who was
shot to death by the police for no apparent reason - afterwards, police
plotted he was a communist, therefore a menacing.
Who was Lazarus? And who is Brik? These are questions we should have
in mind while reading the novel. The Lazarus name works both for the
character and a metaphor as the Bible's Lazarus - a man who Christ raised
from the death. Both of them have a sister who will fight for their integrity.
Each chapter of "The Lazarus Project" are opened by a picture either from
Chicago Historical Society or taken by Velbor Bozovi. The add not only a
sense of image, but they do enhance the narrative, since, they are

supposed to be by one of the characters - a Bosnian photographer living in
the USA that travels back to Eastern Europe with Brik.
In his third book, Hemon displays an assurance that some old timers do
not have. His prose is beautiful, but his tackling is more important. He
brings an old story about intolerance and connects it to the contemporary
USA making "The Lazarus Project" as beautiful as relevant.
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