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O Projecto Lazarus (2008)

by Aleksandar Hemon(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Civilização Editora

review 1: There are two stories being told in this novel: the principal voice is of an author who is writing about events that took place in March 1908 in Chicago, which he intersperses with accounts of his life and his efforts to get more information for this writing project. What's disconcerting is that the author character appears very similar to Hemon, but this similarity is supposed to be ignored, as any identification of the author with his character is part of the pathetic fallacy, pathetic because we (the bumptious reader) fell for the ol' switcheroo. Oh, no. We readers have to understand that creating a character that's an author, who appears to stand in for the actual writer, is merely meta-fictional hi-jinks, the sort of play that enables us to see that the world is rea... morelly just whatever story we want to tell.There is an intriguing premise in this novel, the story of a recent Russian Jew who is gruesomely killed when he merely delivers a letter to Chicago's Chief of Police. This pretext illustrates the precarious nature of the immigrant experience in Chicago, especially for Jews, who were victims in multiple pogroms throughout Russia and eastern Europe. What happened to Lazarus Averbuch? What prompted the police chief to react so violently (the description of his death is a grostesque Mack Sennet-style comedy, weird and incredible)? What was in the letter the police chief read? Why are the contents of the letter never mentioned again?There are some details about Averbuch's back story, and there is a continuation of the story of what happens in the aftermath of his death (the reporter, Averbuch's sister, the manhunt for Averbuch's friend, the burial, Emma Goldman, the re-burial, and the forced conciliation with a Jewish group eager to have the matter white-washed). Averbuch's fate is felt by all of immigrant Chicago, as the police use the "assassination" attempt as an excuse to ferret out and corral anarchists, but it's his sister who is given the emotional crux, dealing with the brutish police, dealing with her grief, dealing with his brother's friend, dealing with the missing body, the conciliating friends, finally leaving the United States for Europe.Hemon alter ego, the author character, tells something of his story, which is similar to Hemon's: he'd come to the US in 1990, when the fighting in Sarajevo drove him to seek asylum; he's become a writer; he's wins a grant to work on his book about Lazarus. Does Hemon also have a brain surgeon wife? Does he travel with a former Bosnian school chum to Eastern Europe to research the Lazarus story? No matter. The travels to Europe with Rora are occasion to learn more about displacement and about the fictions that surround historical fact, as Rora tells dead pan jokes and tale after tale about how he was in the midst of the serious fighting in the Bosnian war. When Rora is killed and his camera stolen, the author character is certain it had something to do with the characters Rora had told him about, those who'd had influence in the war. Rora's sister, a doctor, laughs at the author character's naivete, the gullibility that allowed him to listen and believe and embellish Rora's tales.Despite the layers of fiction, there are still moments of feeling, both in the Lazarus story and in the author character story, though the first person author character is not wholly to be trusted or admired. The meandering and maudlin aspects of the author character's story seem haphazard, calculated to annoy, especially when the Lazarus story appears to be more focused and purposeful. I even felt some disdain at the seeming laziness of Hemon's meta-fiction, that he'd simply use his own slightly altered life as a vehicle to tell his story. The Lazarus story is presented as controlled art, but there is an attempt to confuse the art and the chaos of the author character's reality with the employment of echoes and repetitions of words and phrases that span the two narratives. The novel in a nutshell is a weaving of two stories, one of which is the telling of the other story. An implicit story would be how a reader disentangles the two stories, how to find out what's real and what's not. It's fun, it's real, it's annoying, it's false, it's engaging, and it's—against all odds—affecting.
review 2: Alexandar Hemon is a Czech immigrant. He is adept in his adopted language. The main protagonist of this novel is also a Czech immigrant who has received a grant to assist him in writing the story of a young Jewish immigrant - Lazurus - to Chicago who was killed by the police in the early 1900s. Supposidly Lazurus was an anachist and involved in such activities. The author decides to go to Europe to do research on Lazurus. He is joined by a friend - a photojournalist from Sarajevo - as he follows Lazurus path. The book alternates between Lazurus' story and the life of the author of his story. This is another of those books that I remember where I was when I was reading it - Dublin in 2008 around the time that John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate and lost my vote. less

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