The Lazarus Project
November 05, 2009 - by Dean GarnerTonight I will have dinner and a book discussion with several students from Adelphi University's Honors College. Our novel: Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project.
Hemon won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004, and he is certainly some sort of genius. The Lazarus Project is not quite like any novel I know. The playful narrative inventiveness perhaps recalls some of Nabokov's work more than any other. Hemon also infuses his work with Slavic melancholy and sardonic humor. The novel's narrator is a writer, and he has many stories to tell.
The novel explores the progroms that took place in Kishinev (Bessarabia/Moldova/Russia--one of those parts of the world that from decade to decade gets different names) in 1903 and 1905, the death in Chicago in 1908 of Lazarus Averbuch, an immigrant who survived the 1903 pogrom, and life of the narrator, a writer who left Sarajevo in 1992, lives in Chicago in 2004, and who visits Kishinev and Sarajevo with a photographer, an old acquaintance of his from Sarajevo whom he encounters in Chicago.
Hemon works in the European tradition of the grand philosophical novel, exploring questions of life and death, violence and power, freedom and the individual, the discovery and creation of the self and of the story of the self. Hemon's characters and themes remind one variously of works of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Ford, Nabokov and Barth--but all combined into one work.
From the start the novel examines story telling in a series of alternating variations--newspaper accounts, daydreams, dreams, jokes, interrogations--Hemon's invention is boundless. The stories from 1903, 1908, and 2004 are so intricately interwoven that it's virtually impossible at some points to distinguish between fact and fiction, invention and reality. And of course that's part of Hemon's project. But just part.... I'm eager for the discussion with students tonight. I'm sure I'll learn more from them and know more about the novel tomorrow than I do today.
Posted by Molly Mann on November 05, 2009 at 11:36 AM EST #