The Lazarus Project
By Mary J. Elkins, Special to the Rocky
Published May 29, 2008 at 7 p.m.
* Fiction. By Aleksander Hemon. Riverhead Books, $24.95. Grade: A
Plot in a nutshell: A young writer named Brik, living in Chicago in the early years of the 21st century, becomes interested in and then obsessed with the story of another man who, like Brik, was an immigrant from Eastern Europe.
In 1908, Lazarus Averbuch was shot and killed by George Shippy, at that time the chief of police in Chicago. Averbuch had arrived at Shippy's home one morning to deliver a letter. Shippy, unnerved by the young man's demeanor and foreign appearance, decided that he must be an anarchist bent on terrorism and called to his wife for his gun. After Lazarus' death, panic and political purges threaten to take over the city.
When Brik encounters this story (almost 100 years later), he has lived in America for some time and is even married to an American doctor. But the story and the similarities between his and Averbuch's backgrounds pull him back to Eastern Europe in an endeavor to learn the "truth" of this event. He travels with a friend, Rora, a photographer who fills him with stories of his time in the Bosnian wars of the 1990s. Their journey ends in Sarajevo - and in violence.
The plot is only minimally the point. It's a starting place. Ultimately, the novel is a meditation on life and death and on the bonds between people, even people one has never met - perhaps even especially people one has never met.
Sample of prose: "I replayed Rora's story in the sordid Business Center room, unable to fall asleep, owing to gallons of Viennese coffee, and turn it all into a dream so I can forget about it. Rora, naturally, was asleep - he had trouble neither with coffee nor with the memory-dream transitions."
Pros: Hemon, born in Sarajevo, has a marvelous feel for places - their sounds and smells, their distinctness and particularity. In addition, he gives his central characters memorable qualities; they are sympathetic without being sentimental.
Cons: The heart-pounding pace with which the novel begins slows a bit in the middle. But it never drags, and the tension remains throughout.
Final word: This is as engrossing a novel as I've read in some time.
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