By Aleksandar Hemon

The Lazarus Project is a novel composed of two long stories spliced together. First, there is the story of Lazarus Averbuch’s death and his (sort of) resurrection, then the story of Vladimir Blok working on a book about Lazarus Averbuch’s death?The Lazarus Project, itself. The book is about storytelling, about lies, nostalgia, and world making. It’s about how the world resists the individuals who try to make their mark on it. Above all, it is about home. Home is where someone misses you when you are gone, Hemon writes—it’s the best definition I’ve heard.

The sense of home is what I love the most about Hemon’s prose. I share Chicago with him, and his Chicago is full of the same landmarks and haunted by the same ghosts as my Chicago. Hemon’s sense of place is fantastic though that he makes prewar Sarajevo—even Sarajevo under siege—just as familiar and as much our shared city as Chicago. I have never seen the place, never been exposed to random sniper fire. Hemon’s prose makes it real. The crisp precision of his writing drops you straight into its own world. Reading “A Coin,” gives you a sudden urge to call your best friends just to make sure they haven’t been shot while crossing the street.

As good as The Question of Bruno was, The Lazarus Project is better. Whereas Josef Pronek was merely a character in a work, merely the one who has a story to be told, Brik is very self-consciously the writer of the book in your hands. Brik’s writing, in contrast to Hemon’s in Bruno or Nowhere Man, is less polished, and his English is poorer. The effect, as it doesn’t rely on obvious solecisms, is quite subtle. For example, Brik seems incapable of using contractions, even in what is clearly personal prose, which does more than a little to make the prose seem foreign, or at least on edge about seeming out of place. Contrast this to Jonathan Safran Foer, who puts five or eight obtuse howlers on a page, to about the expected effect.

And Brik, despite his own doubt, is necessarily a writer. He has to write because, despite being an atheist, he is an ardent believer in the possibility of meaning in life. As we well know, a successful storyteller is a maker of worlds, and woven into the fabric of these worlds are the requirements that a life must satisfy in order to be meaningful. The solipsistic response, of course, is that there is nothing in the world that is not a projection of the self, and therefore there is no meaning but what one’s own understanding may project. One only runs into one’s own self over and over. Jonathan Safran Foer, for example, writes about a Jonathan Safran Foer who goes in search of his roots only to find?who else??Jonathan Safran Foer. In order for the possibility of meaning to gain any sort of traction, the storyteller has reach farther than himself. Here, Hemon succeeds where so many of his contemporaries fail.

One of the Hemon’s most compelling characters is Rora, Brik’s utterly mesmerizing former classmate. Rora is in the tradition of those indomitable male characters like Jack Duluoz’s Cody Pomeray, or Nick Carraway’s Jay Gatsby, and like them they are the necessary foil for the teller of the story.

He stuck out in the morning Andersonville crowd embarking upon their day’s work of achieving perfection. I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had know but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible. Needless to say, I envied him.

Needless to say, readers are always drawn to such characters; we want to be mesmerizing, too. Rora, our antihero, constantly regales Brik with stories from the Bosnian war, partly to prove that he, Rora, could handle anything, and partly to remind Brik that he wasn’t there to experience the suffering for himself. For Rora, not being there makes a fundamental difference. If you didn’t experience it yourself (or rather, given the fact that he is an incorrigible liar, that you can claim that you experienced it yourself) you don’t have the right to tell the story, you don’t have sovereign ownership over the story. It denies the power of imagination, and the possibility of writing anything but a memoir (but reopens all the possibilities with the tantalization of an elaborate lie).

And Rora is a gambler. A gambler who always wins, no less. Here, imagine Bob le Flambeur on his seemingly interminable winning streak. But of course, as we all know from every casino movie, every gambler’s lucky streak comes to an end. Rora gets killed, inevitably, but we also know from every casino movie, the gambler loses because he wanted to lose all along, even if he didn’t want to acknowledge his own self-destructive streak. Rora dies, inevitably, and if he had had it his own way all along, everything would have been over. But his death proves that which what makes writerly world-making different from solipsistic world-making. If Rora was the only one qualified to tell his own story, then his death meant the death of the possibility of meaning for his life. As the old Yiddish tradition goes, every person carries his own world, and that murder is fundamentally wrong because taking a life means destroying that whole world. If Rora had it his way, his death meant the death of the only world. Even so, Brik’s survives to tell his story. One mirror of this is that newspaper reports carried on the possibility of the meaning of Lazarus’s world because Brik could reinvent his world from the fragments that remained.

Woven into the novel are subtle tricks and mirrorings that show that Hemon has a more complete grasp of the facts in Brik’s world than Brik, and his complete control of his material shows his mastery. Not only does Rora needed Brik to tell his story, but the same way, Brik needs Hemon to subtly reweave his. Reviewers love to compare Hemon to Nabokov, but end up implying that Hemon is a pale shadow of the grand master. Oh? Comparing third novels, The Lazarus Project certainly surpasses The Defense. Hemon has show that he can stand on his own. Meet the new master.

Reviewed by James Liu

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead Books, 2008
Cloth, 294 pgs, $24.95
ISBN-10: 1594489882