The Hemon Project
Saturday, 21. November 2009, 03:55:16
Book group this week: our current read was the 2008 novel by Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon, Bosnian by birth, one of those disgustingly gifted "furreners" 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. We had a lot to talk about with "Lazarus Project": immigration, anarchism, post-traumatic stress, decaying eastern europe, narrative strategies. . . It was one of the best book group choices we've had in a while."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, and checking out his short story collections in the near future - particulary "Nowhere Man."























