Volume 55, Number 19 · December 4, 2008
In Search of the Outrageous Past
By Elaine Blair
The Lazarus Project
by Aleksandar Hemon, with photographs by Velibor Bozovic and from the Chicago Historical Society
Riverhead, 294 pp., $24.95
Aleksandar Hemon's new novel begins in a state of doubt. One of its main characters, Vladimir Brik, is struggling to write a novel about Lazarus Averbuch, a nineteen-year-old Jewish immigrant in Chicago who was killed by the chief of police in 1908 on suspicion of being an anarchist. But Brik is full of misgivings about his project. He is an immigrant himself, whose biography and mordant wit will be familiar to readers of Hemon's previous novel, Nowhere Man (2002), and his book of short stories, The Question of Bruno (2000). Born and raised in Sarajevo (in a secular family of Christian descent), Brik, like Hemon himself, came to the US just before the Bosnian war broke out in 1992, and ended up staying much longer than he originally intended.
Review, 4270 words
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