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Hey, Danica McKellar, did you ever get high with Fred Savage?
Published on 8/5/08
Video
Can a person come back from the dead? That is one of several artfully posed questions in The Lazarus Project, the new novel by Aleksandar Hemon, who grew up in Sarajevo and now resides in the U.S. He’s not talking about Jesus or zombies. Rather, his story sketches the metaphorical resurrection of his protagonist, Brik, a young Chicago writer who has been divorced from his upbringing in Bosnia.
Brik himself enacts another resuscitation when he decides to write about a young Eastern European Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch, who nearly 100 years earlier—at a time when many foreigners were suspected of being anarchists—was shot and killed by Chicago’s police chief. After receiving a generous grant, Brik—along with his gloomy photographer friend Rora—travel back to their homeland to investigate Lazarus’s background, which is gradually revealed as the novel begins to shift between Lazarus’s story in turn-of-the-century Chicago and Brik and Rora in the present-day Balkans.
The comparisons between Hemon and Nabokov have been inevitable. Like the late Russian-born novelist, Hemon writes in English, a language he didn’t become fluent in until he came to America in the early ’90s. Those claiming to see deeper, stylistic similarities, though, may be reaching. Hemon’s writing is graceful, but he’s too somber to display Nabokov’s comic energy and linguistic high jinks. Instead, Hemon exerts his subtle powers with a straightforward and apparently autobiographical story about a man who identifies with a historical figure in an attempt to figure out where he belongs.
Hemon reads May 3, 2008.
