The Lazarus Project Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead Books)
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Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian living in Chicago in 2004, is married to a brain surgeon and has a well-read column in the Reader, where he writes about being an immigrant in America. He wants money to research a book about the experience of a particular immigrant—Lazarus Averbuch, an eastern European Jewish teenager from the turn of the century—but refuses to ask his wife for help because he fears that she and her family already see him as a “wastrel or a slacker or a lazy Eastern European.” When he stumbles into the grant that will make his travels possible, he heads to the old country with his buddy Rora, a photo-snapping raconteur who fought in the siege of Sarajevo.
Hemon made his mark with The Question of Bruno, a collection of short stories about war and exile. His debut novel, Nowhere Man, which takes place in Chicago, Sarajevo, Kiev, and Shanghai, expands on the saga of one of Bruno‘s characters, Jozef Pronek, a Bosnian teenager who finds himself stranded and directionless in Chicago. A loyal Hemon reader, six years older and digging into The Lazarus Project, might suffer a bit of deja vu. In Hemon’s latest, a Bosnian man feeling lost in Chicago goes home to learn about an eastern European teenager who immigrated to Chicago. The Lazarus Project, though, separates itself from its predecessors with its time-shifting format, and as ever Hemon’s writing is engaging—colorful, at times gritty, and full of passages that can make a reader nod and mutter his adoration aloud.
When the book shifts to 1908, Lazarus’s best friend explains why the dead boy wanted to become a literary man:
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