The Lazarus Project

Jefferson Mays delivers irony and outrage in calm, controlled tones that belie the passion of Vladimir Brik's first-person narrative. Brik, a Bosnian writer living in present-day America, struggles to bury his shame that his surgeon wife is his family's primary breadwinner. Understanding himself comes largely through researching the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant wrongly murdered as an anarchist in 1908 Chicago. Jefferson Mays's clipped narration is appropriate for the three parts of the novel that are woven together: Brik's remembrances of his own life, the imagined scenes of Lazarus's life, and Brik's experiences in Eastern Europe with Rora, a Bosnian war photographer, as they retrace the locales of Lazarus's life. Mays's words hit with the power of an automatic weapon, emphasizing Hemon's elegant, energetic, and sometimes-shocking style. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 24, 2008
MacArthur genius Hemon in his third book (after Nowhere Man
) intelligently unpacks 100 years’ worth of immigrant disillusion, displacement and desperation. As fears of the anarchist movement roil 1908 Chicago, the chief of police guns down Lazarus Averbuch, an eastern European immigrant Jew who showed up at the chief’s doorstep to deliver a note. Almost a century later, Bosnian-American writer Vladimir Brik secures a coveted grant and begins working on a book about Lazarus; his research takes him and fellow Bosnian Rora, a fast-talking photographer whose photos appear throughout the novel, on a twisted tour of eastern Europe (there are brothel-hotels, bouts of violence, gallons of coffee and many fabulist stories from Rora) that ends up being more a journey into their own pasts than a fact-finding mission. Sharing equal narrative duty is the story of Olga Averbuch, Lazarus’s sister, who, hounded by the police and the press (the Tribune
reporter is especially vile), is faced with another shock: the disappearance of her brother’s body from his potter’s grave. (His name, after all, was Lazarus.) Hemon’s workmanlike prose underscores his piercing wit, and between the murders that bookend the novel, there’s pathos and outrage enough to chip away at even the hardest of hearts.