Books You Really Should’ve Read By Now (Number: #8,684,596): The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American writer living in Chicago. He writes in his adopted, English language and that has earned him high praise in the literary circles with some describing his English as beautiful (which it is) and others comparing him to Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad. Beautiful language only gets you so far, so he has established himself with two story collections: The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man and earned himself a nomination for the National Book Award with his wonderful first novel The Lazarus Project.

The story goes something like this. A young Jewish immigrant from Russia called Lazarus Averbuch gets ‘mistaken’ for an anarchist, and is brutally murdered in the home of the Chicago chief of police in 1908. Any serious investigation into his murder doesn’t follow and, rather unsurprisingly, his name gets smeared in the newspapers of the time with strong anti-Semitic overtones. His sister Olga desperately tries to find out what happened to him but only discovers that institutionalised racism in early 20th century America is like a brick wall hiding the real truth, and that being called an anarchist is just another code word and a scare tactic for dealing with those elements of society that the leading classes of the time would much rather get rid of.

Back in the 21st century we have a Bosnian writer living in Chicago (hint) called Brik. He is awarded a grant, in rather funny circumstances, to write his next novel. Desperate to write about Lazarus, he soon finds that libraries and historic documents aren’t going to be enough, so he decides to take a trip to Eastern Europe to find out more about Lazarus, his homeland and the pogroms that ultimately led him and his sister to America. Accompanying him on this journey is his friend from Bosnia (Rora), a photographer who decides to record their experience. Of course, this journey ultimately takes them to Sarajevo, where tragedy is, as things usually go, guaranteed and where the entire story culminates in a way that is all too familiar in this part of the world.

First things first. This book is responsible for the most beautiful two sentences I’ve read all year. They maybe rather nostalgic and melancholy in tone but they work their magic on me. After Lazarus tries to hand a mysterious letter to the Chicago chief of police he is turned back by the chief’s maid after which he wanders the streets of the wealthy part of Chicago. Amazed at how quiet it is, how the trees look beautiful in the winter morning he thinks to himself:

”All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.”

That really hooked me and made me want to keep reading even more. What follows after is rather more bleak interspersed with healthy doses of familiar Bosnian humour especially when Brik describes his daily life in Chicago, being married to a successful woman who is a neurosurgeon, and explaining what it’s like to be a jobless writer with too much time on his hands. After some thinking and not much planning, Brik and Rora make their journey to Ukraine, the starting point of it all. The travel from post-Soviet Ukraine to post-communist Bosnia reveals the grim after-effects that the so-called transition period has left on these countries. Hemon’s writing from a distant position in his new, but still adopted country offers him what I think is a much wider perspective on everything that afflicted his homeland. He mixes that experience with Lazarus Averbuch’s story in a beautiful way and offers us a new way to look at the tragic events like the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the pogrom of Jews in early 20th century Russia. Without offering us much in the way of some clarity and a happy ending to please all, Hemon by the end fails to entertain any notion that the world now is a better place. We are taken back to our all-too familiar reality and reminded that there is much rebuilding of broken relationships and forgiveness to be done.

Any Cop?: Hemon beautifully connects two very different immigration stories and in the process manages to find humour in the smallest details while at the same time giving us a valuable history lesson. One from which we can all hopefully learn. So yes, go buy the book now.

Davor Jukic