beer good
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Aleksandar Hemon: The Lazarus Project (2008)
In 1992, Yugoslavian citizen Aleksandar Hemon was on vacation in the USA. War broke out at home and suddenly he was a Bosnian. He stayed in the US, learned English and started writing novels in his adopted language.
The exact same thing happened to Vladimir Brik, the narrator of The Lazarus Project - yep, another in a long line of narrators who are suspiciously similar to their author. But where Hemon is a success, Brik is a failure; unable to figure out if he's American, Bosnian, Yugoslavian, Muslim, Catholic or what any of it would mean to him, he drifts, lives off his thoroughly American (well, Irish-American, some immigrants are more equal than others) wife, writes the odd newspaper article about life as an immigrant in a country said to be built by immigrants, but not necessarily for them.
And then he stumbles across the story of Lazarus and becomes utterly fascinated. Not the Biblical Lazarus (well...), but young Lazarus Averbuch, a Russian Jew who was shot to death by the Chicago chief of police in 1908. "He was an anarchist," said the cop. "Look, he has books by Emma Goldman, he was obviously a murderer, I acted in self defense against this dangerous threat." The cop become a hero, Lazarus was demonized in the press and shoveled into an unmarked grave, leaving his sister alone in a strange country wondering what happened to both his body and soul, trying to get him back somehow. In itself, that's a story of homelessness, outsiderhood and xenophobia that needs to be told today, thinks Vladimir (exchange the word "anarchist" for "terrorist" and you'd almost think we just keep repeating history...) But since everything we know about Lazarus was written down by people who wanted to portray him as a dangerous fanatic, the novelist has to step in and fill in the blanks. So together with a childhood friend from Sarajevo who, unlike him, took part in the civil war, Vladimir sets off for Eastern Europe to find Lazarus' roots (Chicago having been torn down and rebuilt several times since 1908).
What we get in The Lazarus Project are two parallel stories; the (character) assassination and subsequent mythification of a young Jew in early 20th century America, and two Bosnians (whatever that is) travelling through Ukraine, Moldova and Bosnia searching for some sort of story to help explain both Lazarus and themselves. How do you handle a diaspora if you're not even Jewish? How to you handle national matyrdom if you've barely even set foot in your supposed home country? And since Hemon loves playing with narrative and language structures, the stories start affecting each other; names from Chicago turn up in the Ukraine, American war correspondents from the 1990s help slander Jews 100 years earlier, all while Brik's friend adds bloody anecdotes from a war that's still going on on some level. Through it all, the question: when, and for how long, does a person really die? We put names on tombstones and visit them, idolize them, demonize them, speak for the dead while dismissing their own stories. The Biblical Lazarus' only function is to be brought back to life; what happened to him before and after, why is his story not about him?
That's the sort of parallels and questions that The Lazarus Project is full of, and it's all very interesting. Unfortunately, it's also wildly uneven. Where the story of Po’ Lazarus and his sister really is gripping, Brik et al's travels feel more like a second-rate Ryszard Kapuscinski, and despite the experimental glee with which Hemon approaches his new language (and country) and it's opportunities, he doesn't really manage to lift it that extra level; Brik remains a fairly whiny and uninteresting character, and the parallels he creates feel forced. It's an intellectual exercize, where the contemporary "real" (ie fictional) don't get half of the personality that the historical "fictional" (ie real) characters do.
I recently read Georges Perec's Ellis Island (1980), which says as much, if not more, about the same issues in a lot fewer words. At one point, Perec refers to Kafka's Amerika and its depiction of the Statue of Liberty holding a sword, musing:
In 1992, Yugoslavian citizen Aleksandar Hemon was on vacation in the USA. War broke out at home and suddenly he was a Bosnian. He stayed in the US, learned English and started writing novels in his adopted language.
The exact same thing happened to Vladimir Brik, the narrator of The Lazarus Project - yep, another in a long line of narrators who are suspiciously similar to their author. But where Hemon is a success, Brik is a failure; unable to figure out if he's American, Bosnian, Yugoslavian, Muslim, Catholic or what any of it would mean to him, he drifts, lives off his thoroughly American (well, Irish-American, some immigrants are more equal than others) wife, writes the odd newspaper article about life as an immigrant in a country said to be built by immigrants, but not necessarily for them.
And then he stumbles across the story of Lazarus and becomes utterly fascinated. Not the Biblical Lazarus (well...), but young Lazarus Averbuch, a Russian Jew who was shot to death by the Chicago chief of police in 1908. "He was an anarchist," said the cop. "Look, he has books by Emma Goldman, he was obviously a murderer, I acted in self defense against this dangerous threat." The cop become a hero, Lazarus was demonized in the press and shoveled into an unmarked grave, leaving his sister alone in a strange country wondering what happened to both his body and soul, trying to get him back somehow. In itself, that's a story of homelessness, outsiderhood and xenophobia that needs to be told today, thinks Vladimir (exchange the word "anarchist" for "terrorist" and you'd almost think we just keep repeating history...) But since everything we know about Lazarus was written down by people who wanted to portray him as a dangerous fanatic, the novelist has to step in and fill in the blanks. So together with a childhood friend from Sarajevo who, unlike him, took part in the civil war, Vladimir sets off for Eastern Europe to find Lazarus' roots (Chicago having been torn down and rebuilt several times since 1908).
What we get in The Lazarus Project are two parallel stories; the (character) assassination and subsequent mythification of a young Jew in early 20th century America, and two Bosnians (whatever that is) travelling through Ukraine, Moldova and Bosnia searching for some sort of story to help explain both Lazarus and themselves. How do you handle a diaspora if you're not even Jewish? How to you handle national matyrdom if you've barely even set foot in your supposed home country? And since Hemon loves playing with narrative and language structures, the stories start affecting each other; names from Chicago turn up in the Ukraine, American war correspondents from the 1990s help slander Jews 100 years earlier, all while Brik's friend adds bloody anecdotes from a war that's still going on on some level. Through it all, the question: when, and for how long, does a person really die? We put names on tombstones and visit them, idolize them, demonize them, speak for the dead while dismissing their own stories. The Biblical Lazarus' only function is to be brought back to life; what happened to him before and after, why is his story not about him?
That's the sort of parallels and questions that The Lazarus Project is full of, and it's all very interesting. Unfortunately, it's also wildly uneven. Where the story of Po’ Lazarus and his sister really is gripping, Brik et al's travels feel more like a second-rate Ryszard Kapuscinski, and despite the experimental glee with which Hemon approaches his new language (and country) and it's opportunities, he doesn't really manage to lift it that extra level; Brik remains a fairly whiny and uninteresting character, and the parallels he creates feel forced. It's an intellectual exercize, where the contemporary "real" (ie fictional) don't get half of the personality that the historical "fictional" (ie real) characters do.
I recently read Georges Perec's Ellis Island (1980), which says as much, if not more, about the same issues in a lot fewer words. At one point, Perec refers to Kafka's Amerika and its depiction of the Statue of Liberty holding a sword, musing:
I'm not necessarily saying "read Perec instead", because stories need to be told and re-told and The Lazarus Project tackles more recent issues and is a pretty decent novel. It's just that as with many things awakened from the dead, I'm not entirely sure it has a soul.