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    The Lazarus Project
    The Lazarus Project
    The Lazarus Project
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Lazarus Project

    Written by Aleksandar Hemon

    Narrated by Jefferson Mays

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Bosnian-American author and MacArthur genius recipient Aleksandar Hemon pens novels of high insight and deft literary accomplishment. The Lazarus Project, alternating between turn-of-the-century Chicago and modern times, features a man attempting to reimagine the death of a Jewish immigrant. "... there's pathos and outrage enough to chip away at even the hardest of hearts."-Publishers Weekly, starred review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 27, 2009
    ISBN9781440708589
    The Lazarus Project
    Author

    Aleksandar Hemon

    Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo and lives in Chicago. He is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, and The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work also appears regularly in the New Yorker and Granta, among other publications.

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    Reviews for The Lazarus Project

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      This novel beautifully entwines the barbarism of early 20th Century Chicago with the barbarism of Bosnian ethnic cleansing. The narrative is gorgeous and harrowing, calling into question the notion of national identity, homeland, and the clash of cultures. Perception, in this work, is everything, yet makes clear that what we experience is only part of the whole story.
    • 5/5
      This is a fascinating and irresistible book, full of stories within stories and wonderful language and imagery. As the back of the book tells us, "On March 2, 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, was shot to death while visiting the home of the Chicago police chief and cast as a would-be anarchist assassin." This, in fact, is an actual event, and out of it Memon has spun a web of stories within stories, sending his protagonist, Brik, modern-day would-be writer, a Bosnian immigrant to America unsure of his place in his new country and his marriage, on a journey of memory, discovery and loss. Brik goes off to Eastern Europe in search of Averbuch's story. He starts in Averbuch's native Moldova, where he had been a survivor of the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903, traces his journey through the Ukraine and Romania, then takes a turn to visit his own home city, Sarajevo. On this journey he brings along his own Scheherazade, Rora, a photographer and a boyhood friend from Sarajevo. The difference between the two friends is that while Brik left Bosnia before the obviously imminent war there actually broke out, Rora stayed to live through the deadly siege of the city. So throughout the narrative, Brik is spinning tales, imaginary episodes in the life of Averbuch's death and the circumstances of his life, as well as the horrific experiences of his sister afterwards interweaved with incidents of his journey with Rora and reflections on his sadly unsettled marriage with an American surgeon patiently waiting for her husband to get with the program of American life. And Rora is spinning tales for Brik about his experiences during the bloody siege of Sarajevo, tales just tall enough to waver at the border between believable and fanciful.It all sounds confusing, yet is rendered completely comprehensible and often moving by Hemon's beautiful writing. Here is an example, longer than I usually like to provide but hard to chop up:"Often, before I went to sleep, I remembered--or I should say I tried not to forget. Before I passed out, I recollected particular moments in slumberous tranquility; I replayed conversations; I reflected upon smells and colors; I remembered myself as I used to be, twenty years before, or earlier that day. The ritual was my nightly prayer, a contemplation of my presence in the world.It often got out of hand: possible stories sprouted from the recalled instants and images. Take the afternoon in Lviv when I stepped out of the bathroom after a long and torturous time in the trickling shower to find Rora napping, so peacefully invested in his dream that he looked like somebody I did not know. When, fading to sleep that night, I reflected upon his face, I envisioned a story in which I woke up and found him dead in a hotel room we were sharing. I had to call the reception desk and deal with all the logistics of removing his body from the room, from the world. I had to call his sister and break the heartbreaking news and so I went through his stuff, only to discover that he had a forged Austrian passport with a different name and a plane ticket to Vienna for the next morning. When I called the only phone number I found among his belongings, nobody picked up the phone.Many of these stories turned unnoticeably into a dream, whereby the narrative went completely haywire and I become but a confused character within it, unable to escape the plot. I could only snap out of it, and if I did I instantly lost the dream, its reality vanishing the moment I woke up. Occasionally, a violently involuntary memory of a dream emerged in my mind, like a corpse released from the bottom of the lake. Once, with a perfect sensory clarity, I recalled the weight of the schoolbag on my shoulder in which I carried, like a puppy, the war criminal Rodovan Karadzic."In addition the descriptions of the places the pair visits together provide a gritty feeling for the often stark circumstances of life in those countries.
    • 4/5
      I'm kind of in love with Aleksandar Hemon. Truthfully, this is really a 4 1/2 out of 5 stars for me. The flaws are minimal. Hemon goes back and forth between a semi autobiographical narrative and story line of his own journey back home and to the roots of his research as well as the original story of Lazarus Averbuch...what starts in Chicago goes much much farther. Hemon's grasp of the English language and how to write overall are just astounding. It is heartbreaking and insightful as any novel should be.


      Some quotes:

      p.2 "The trees here are watered by our blood, Isador would say, the streets paved with our bones; they eat our children for breakfast then dump the leftovers in the garbage."

      p.3 "Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there."

      p. 9 "...the gun smoke slowly moving across the room like a school of fish."

      p.67 "What needs to be photographed will be photographed."

      p. 73 "One morning in Chicago I had tiptoes to the kitchen with the intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a dessicated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups, waiting. My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness."

      p. 103 "It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth-reality is the fastest growing American commodity."

      p.167 "Everything is attracted by its end."

      p. 284 "She was like everyody else because there was nobody like her."

    • 3/5
      So, I missed the book club meeting for this selection, but I did finish the book. For once.The Lazarus Project has some really wonderful language, but the structure sometimes came off as contrived. It reminded me of the movie Adaptation, which is the fictionalization (word? not a word?) of Charlie Kaufman's failed attempt to write a screen adaptation of The Orchid Thief. Both Kaufman and Hemon manage to insert themselves (but not really! one or two personal details have changed!) into a story about someone else entirely, wrenching the spotlight away from where it belongs. Not everything is about you, boys.In the case of The Lazarus Project, the spotlight should have stayed on Lazarus Averbuch and his sister Olga. Especially Olga, I wish Hemon had given us more of her. He writes grief well. Whatever issues I had with the book, I still recommend it, mostly because of the last 25 pages or so. And definitely take note of the illustrations, half of which are photographs reproduced from the Chicago Daily News collection at the Chicago Historical Society (yay, archives!).
    • 1/5
      overlapping plots slowly blend into a miasma
    • 4/5
      There are three separate stories in this book: one is the killing of Russian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908; another is the struggle of the narrator, Bosnian immigrant Brik, to adapt to life in contemporary Chicago; a third is the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia, as told mostly by Brik's friend Rora.At first the different stories are told in separate chapters, but as the novel progresses they gradually merge, so that the narrative shifts abruptly between the different times and spaces. Even within each individual stories, there are frequent flashbacks to earlier events, such as the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which Lazarus and his family lived through, or Brik's early life in America.It sounds confusing, but it wasn't at all difficult to follow. Hemon is a skilled storyteller, and although the movements in time and space are abrupt, they feel natural. I think he's captured very successfully the nature of memory. There is often a certain logic to the memories, but it's not an obviously "rational" logic - it's more subconscious, to do with shapes, smells, colours, etc. I was once walking past a carpet shop, and the smell of the chemical they'd used to clean the carpets gave me an incredibly powerful image of my childhood bedroom where I crawled around playing with cars. It was abrupt but made a certain sense.I think that's the kind of thing that Hemon is trying to achieve here, and he handles it very well. As the narrator, Brik, does more research into Lazarus's story, he starts thinking about Lazarus more often, and the story in some way merges with his own. That matches my experience of working on a book - when it's going well and you're immersed in it, you think about it at the most unexpected times. So the abrupt shifts from a Moldovan car ride to Brik's marriage to the Kishinev progrom felt natural to me.There are quite a few parallels, too, between the different times and places. Names are repeated - Schuettler is both the Assistant Chief of the 1908 Chicago police and the contemporary source of Brik's writing grant; Miller is a reporter in 1908 Chicago and also 1990s Sarajevo. In all three stories there is an ultimate lack of meaning or even truth - we never know for sure why Lazarus went to visit the Chief of Police or what was in the letter he was carrying; Rora is established from the beginning as a teller of far-fetched tale's, so it's impossible to know which of his stories of Sarajevo are true; Brik's marriage is falling apart for reasons that are elusive.Hemon repeats several times something like the phrase "She was like everybody else because there was nobody like her", and I think the parallels between the stories are a way of showing that, although the individual is always different and the specific circumstances change, much about the human experience remains the same. The Lazarus story is clearly meant to tell us something about contemporary America - the hysteria about "Jewish anarchists" in 1908, the hysteria about "Muslim extremists/terrorists" a century later. Lazarus is also, of course, s Biblical symbol of resurrection, and I think Hemon is saying something here about how individuals' stories are resurrected by groups within society and given a new, completely different life. The newspapers and politicians of the day made Lazarus into a demon; the anarchists made him into a martyr. Neither version was true. Yet throughout time we continue to do the same things (think of the "life after death" of Michael Jackson, for example, or Princess Diana, or JFK). I wonder if Hemon is also saying something about the "collective unconscious" - Jung's idea that beyond our individual experiences, we also tap into a "reservoir of experiences" of humanity.Hemon is one of those writers who leaves a lot unsaid, and also casts doubt on the veracity of much of what has been said. Perhaps that's why, after 300 pages of engaging prose, the ending felt a little flat. In all three strands of the book, many things happened, but not much really changed. I suspect that's the point, but still it felt a little disappointing. In Hemon's book of short stories, "A Question of Bruno", the open endings worked really well. In a novel, you invest so much more time and energy into the characters, and it's disappointing when the book effectively just stops. It's probably more true to life than a novel where everything is neatly wrapped up and all the loose ends tied, but I still felt that I wanted something more from the ending. That's about my only complaint. Will definitely be reading his next book.
    • 3/5
      Take one of the most interesting periods in U.S. history. Throw in the facts from a heinous, racially charged hate crime and its cover up by Chicago authorities. Put these in a book by one of today's most entertaining, linguistically gifted authors. The result should be a powerful and interesting tale. Unfortunately, it's not.

      Hemon's usually rich language feels commonplace in this book. The story is slow and doesn't tie together in a way I found to be worthwhile. Throughout the novel, I felt like Hemon was trying his hand at something huge, something brilliant, but it never comes together. The three worlds of The Lazarus Project--the historical, the semi-autobiographical present, and the photographic--all are moving in a whirlwind of passion, but to what aim? How do they relate in a life changing way? Unfortunately, for me they did not.

      I imagine this may have been a very personal project for Hemon; perhaps it was meaningful to him and the novel's purpose was fulfilled. I'm glad for him if this is the case. As a reader, however, I was really disappointed with The Lazarus Project--and to think, it had so much potential.

      Nevertheless, I look forward to my next meeting with Aleksandar Hemon. I have no doubts it will be a delight.
    • 5/5
      This stunning novel interleaves the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant, killed in Chicago in 1908 and framed as part of the "anarchist menace", with that of Vladimir Brik, an early-21st century writer, a Bosnian immigrant to the US (like Hemon himself) who becomes interested in the case and travels through the Balkans and Eastern Europe researching Lazarus' family history, hoping to get a novel out of it.The 1908 section - the anti-anarchist panic, the callous framing of an innocent young man and the media response to Lazarus' supposed evil crime - is properly angry-making, although it does lose its way a little as the novel goes on. The sections set in the modern-day, desperate and gangster-ridden Eastern Europe are more depressing than angering. But the prose is incredible, and the book stirs up all sorts of ideas, about home, freedom, the old world and the new, and what it means to know someone else. The echoes between the events of both sections lead the reader to think about twenty-first century genocides and xenophobias, as well as the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ones which are directly explored. I had to keep forcing myself to slow down so that I could really get the most out of the writing itself and also the ideas behind it.Sample: One morning in Chicago I had tiptoed to the kitchen with the intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a desiccated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups, waiting. My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
    • 4/5
      Hemon presents a dual story of Bosnian immigrants in 1908 and the present. Lazarus Averbuch comes to Chicago in 1908 to join sister Olga after surviving the pogrom in Bosnia. The question of his death in the foyer of the Chicago police chief is taken up by would be writer Vladimar Brik who escaped to Chicago prior to the war in Sarajevo in the early 90's and then being unable to return, mirroring the author's own experience. The big question is "what was Lazarus doing at the police commissioner's house?" and how/why was he killed? Hemon's prose is beautiful and his story, which intermingles the past and the present, provides a wonderfully fulfilling narrative. Excellent!
    • 4/5
      The Lazarus Project is about a struggling,modern day Bosnian writer researching the 1908 murder of a Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Averbach by a Chicago police chief. Vladmir Brik, the writer, is the narrator of the story and the action is filtered through his experience. The chapters of the book alternate between the telling of Lazarus' killing and its effect on his sister and friend, and Brik's half-hearted attempt to research and write the story. The major theme of this book seems to be the difficulty for foreigners in adapting to American life and overcoming racial bigotry and fear. It is easy to see the similarities between 1908 Chicago and 21st century Chicago. Both eras suffer from mistrust and misinformation about alien cultures and the practice of terrorism. Ultimately the book is about violence and death and how they are universal for human beings regardless of time and circumstance. The Lazarus Project is both desperate and depressing at times but always maintains interest
    • 4/5
      This novel juxtaposes two parallel stories: a painstaking reconstruction of the mysterious death of Lazarus Averbuch, a real-life Jewish immigrant who may have tried to assassinate the Chicago police chief; and the journey of the Vladimir Brik, present-day narrator, also an Eastern European immigrant to Chicago and strongly resembling Hemon, as he returns to Sarajevo to research Lazarus’ story. The portion of the book devoted to Lazarus and his sister is told in the present tense, and their imagined movements are tracked in minute detail, while the contemporary story is told in the past tense, and much of the narrator’s trip is elided. The novel develops an emotional resonance between the two sets of characters, as each half of the book grows to echo the other in mood and tone. Hemon plays with fact and fiction throughout, indicating that neither the novelist, nor the journalist, nor the historian has a monopoly on truth.
    • 3/5
      "When the bus finally left the station, I was unsettled by the feeling that we could not return now. Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?" (p 178)The Lazarus Project is the second book by Aleksandar Hemon that I have read. I found the previous one, his first novel Nowhere Man, to be a flawed attempt at novel-writing due both to Hemon's inexperience and his attempt to relate an immigrant's experience in a postmodern way that did not appeal to me; nor did the characters or story or his style help. The Lazarus Project is narrated by a young Chicagoan named Vladimir Brik and like Hemon himself, he grew up in Sarajevo, came to Chicago on a visit and was forced to stay in the United States when war broke out in what was then Yugoslavia. While the new novel is in some ways a continuation of Hemon’s vision of an immigrant’s slanted, postmodern world, its narrator, Vladimir Brik, is also a departure from the ironic yet naïve young man of his earlier book. This is a mature novel about a grown man who is animated by and indeed savors the nuances of disappointment. In one scene, Brik tiptoes into his Chicago kitchen to make coffee before his wife wakes up:"I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.”(p 73)Brik is married to a successful American neurosurgeon who saves lives from “her high position of surgically American decency.” He, on the other hand, struggles “through permanent confusion.” Living with an acute sense of the loss of his homeland and, so, the loss of his identity, Brik has become intrigued with another immigrant: Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jew who escaped the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in what is now Moldova and came to Chicago. This Averbuch is a historical figure whose story is still something of a mystery; but it is known that he arrived at the house of the Chicago chief of police on March 2, 1908; there was some kind of scuffle, and the young man was shot and killed. Still haunted by the anarchist Haymarket riots, in which seven police officers died, and fearing a violent reaction to the mayor’s cancellation of a speech by Emma Goldman, Chicago moved into a state of turmoil. When Brik gets a research grant and takes off for Eastern Europe, following in Lazarus’s footsteps, he brings an old friend along, a photographer and fellow Sarajevan named Rora. Rora and Brik’s road trip is an Eastern European nightmare. They are driven to Bucharest by a somnolent pimp with a terrified young girl held captive in the back seat. In one chapter, set at a bordello hotel called Business Center Bukovina, Hemon constructs a delicate, beautifully rendered fable of ugliness, desolation and heartlessness. They pass a mangy dog as they enter. The window looks out on a huge garbage bin “brimming with glass bottles,” their sparkle providing a brief moment of pleasure: “I always like to see a full garbage container, because I relish the thought of emptying it, the complete unburdening implicit in it.” At the end of the chapter, Brik hears a drunken couple shouting, then laughter, a dog howling and the shattering of glass. “The man and woman had thrown the dog in the garbage container full of bottles and then must have watched it writhing, shredding and slicing itself, trying to escape.”There is to be no escape, no “complete unburdening” for Brik, no emptying of the life he has known and tried both to remember and forget. “Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever,” he notes. I note that this is yet another novel that attempts two different stories, connected at several different levels, but not always successfully. I am reminded of Louis de Berniere's Birds Without Wings which was a similar attempt to interlink two related stories, also unsuccessfully in my estimation. Hemon's attempt is more concise and retains its ability to capture the reader's attention with mystery and intrigue, along with some humor, that propel both stories. The novel's short chapters interspersed with introductory historical photographs (does he think that the readers' imaginations need help?) also keep the narrative from flagging. The result is a satisfying read but one that for me was not quite as "stunning" as opined by some critics.
    • 4/5
      Shapeless, pointless, depressing, but individual stories and scenes funny/entertaining. No conclusions, Bosnia is life, America death, his return his rebirth? Multiple interpretations of the Lazarus mythsIntense loneliness and dislocation of young men who have come to America to escape European conflicts, whether it's 1903 or 1992, Jewish Lazarus, or the Bosnian columnist who plans to write about him. Fluid and murky, Ideas about truth, history, propaganda, and what emotive terms like 'know' and 'self, and 'home' might mean. Patterns are set up, but not resolved, parallels drawn but not cleanly, instead everyone is drawn into a spiders web of overlapping stories with overlapping levels of 'truth'.Outside perspective as well as the style keeps us distant from the characters, even as the narrator longs for closeness with his wife, his friend, his current life, his history.
    • 5/5
      This book is so well-written that even though the story is about a difficult subject, I didn't want to put it down. Hemon is a very talented writer.
    • 4/5
      This is a marvelous and affecting novel that moves between the early 20th Century and the present day, between Chicago and Eastern Europe. Sometimes funny, sometimes terribly sad, and always intelligent.
    • 3/5
      A very strange book, I found. In one way it gripped me in another it didn't. It's a strange loose story that doesn't quite come together. I realise it was probably the author's intention that it doesn't come together. But I'm afraid I wanted it to and it failed me there...
    • 4/5
      Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon, Bosnian by birth, is one of those disgustingly gifted "furreners" (Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, et al.) who dare to write in English even though it's not their native tongue. Hemon is a refugee from the 1990s war which accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia - a conflict which ravaged his home city of Sarajevo. The novel touches on issues of immigration, anarchism, post-traumatic stress, decaying eastern europe, post-modern narrative strategies. . . There's a lot going on in 300 pages."The Lazarus Project" tells two interlocking stories, one of a real-life early 20th century Jewish immigrant to Chicago named Lazarus Averbuch, killed in 1908 by the city's chief of police in circumstances that can only be described as bizarre. That tale is interwoved with that of Vladimir Brik, who is a Chicagoan in the early 21st century, one of those disgustingly gifted "furreners" who dare to write in English even though it's not their native tongue. Brik, who is working on a book about Lazarus Averbuch, is a "double" for Hemon himself, very similar but not the same. Hemon likes games and playfulness in his narrative: mirrors and echoes and "doppelgangers". "Lazarus Project" has brilliant passages of taut prose, is ingenuously plotted, and has a strong rootedness in a little-known but fascinating period of american urban history. I really liked the use of photographs, some from early 20th century Chicago, some from contemporary eastern europe. My two reservations: Brik, the narrator, is very unreliable (and rather difficult to endure, if you ask me); and the story of his marriage is under-developed. Vladimir Brik comes across as a selfish artist with tremendous internalized self-hatred, but his beautiful neurosurgeon wife supposedly puts up with him anyway. I didn't buy it. But the book works well in other regards, and I'll be following Hemon's career in the future.
    • 4/5
      The Lazarus Project is a story of two Chicago immigrants: a turn-of-the-century Ukrainian Jew, Lazarus, who is killed by the chief of police under mysterious circumstances, and a Bosnian writer of modern times, Brik, who discovers Lazarus' story while doing research. Brik's digging leads him back into post-Soviet Eastern Europe in search of Lazarus' past and his own. The unfolding of their intertwined stories is a brilliant meditation on immigration, home, love, war, and the tarnish on America's streets of gold. It's one of the best works of fiction I've read this year.
    • 5/5
      I've always been drawn to writers for whom English is a second language. The best have a fresh, off-beat perspective and bring a renewed vigor to English. (Think: Conrad, Nabokov, Vikram Chandra, Salmon Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart.) I also find translations, no matter how good, frustrating, so reading foreign-born authors in their original language (English!) is exciting and liberating. Hemon, who was born in Bosnia and is now a U.S. citizen, is a master stylist, a great storyteller, and deserves the accolades he's received. Highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      This book had real potential but somehow failed to reach it. The makings of a really good story were there and sometimes I thought it was going to break through but it never really did. It ended up being rather aimless and the two main plots of Lazarus and Brik were really interesting but insufficient information and depth was achieved on both. Disappointing.