My book club, 9 women of a certain age, found this book to be very disappointing. I didn't even finish it, but those who did thought the story was disjointed and left a lot of loose ends. I just found it tedious and not worth my time,

I rarely read books of this kind and I once again found out why. This is simply a poor literature. But that is not all. The moral character of the hero is very questionable. For instance he is making fun of people who tried to help him. The author tried to shock us with Lazarus story and convey simpathy. He did not succeed (even though I see the paralel with the current "war on terror"). This book is very partial, condescending and pretentios. In one word: BAD.

I don't write reviews often, but I felt compelled to do so for this book . As said before, the Lazarus Averbuch affair is interwoven with a strange modern-day odyssey into various cities in Eastern Europe in search of answers. What's really special about this book and what made me really crazy for it was the language. Read it and see for yourself. Some expressions and phrases are so effective and so original that they made the narrative many times more colorful than it already is.

Read this book and see things in a different way. Read this book and enjoy the wonder of beautiful prose.

With "The Lazarus Project," wordsmith and Sarajevo-born Aleksandar Hemon takes the real-life, early 1900s murder of a Jewish American at the hands of the Chicago police - the chief of police, no less - and uses it as a point of departure to explore his own immigrant identity. The resulting work of fiction then cuts back and forth between the more engaging, true-crime storyline and the modern-day events, which see Hemon researching the Lazarus tragedy. The murder and its aftermath are constantly interrupted by Hemon's own postmodern shenanigans until it gets buried beneath lots of - to borrow one of Hemon's own phrases - "metaphysical abuse." Hemon's stand-in narrator resorts to the usual self-reflexive narrative tricks and employs the standard self-deprecatory humor, along with a heavy dose of self-loathing. And, as usual, it all ends with a moment of renewal and redemption, thanks to the power of storytelling. (Hemon wanders dangerously close to Amy Tan territory.) It's a pity that the talented writer didn't tell the story straight because he clearly did his research. In fact, he has an irritating tendency to quote verbatim long passages from real newspaper clippings, even when describing the contents of a room or crime scene. Couldn't Hemon have used his own words? Even the photographs, some of them actual shots from the early 20th century, that precede each chapter start to seem like a narrative crutch to build mood and atmosphere.

The Lazarus Project starts in medias res; "The time and place, are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908, Chicago. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain, and now I plunge." Aleksandar Hemon masterfully interweaves two stories in this book. The first and most gripping one is the killing of the young Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch. Lazarus escaped the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, only to get shot by the Chicago chief of police in 1908 (see the website of the Jewish historical society for some historical background). It is not clear why the young Lazarus was shot. What is beyond doubt, however, is that turn of the century Chicago was marked by civil unrest following the Haymarket riots. Xenophobia abounded and cool heads did not always prevail. Hemon sketches a very delicate and intimate portrait of the life of Averbuch's sister following the loss of her brother.
The second narrative is the contemporary story of Vladimir Brik, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe in Chicago. Almost a century after Lazarus,however, Chicago is a very different city. Vladimir is writing a story on Lazarus but the reader gets the impression most of his energy is dedicated to finding some peace with his newly acquired and very comfortable life in the US. Using some grant money, he decides to travel to Eastern Europe to shed some light on Lazarus's life before arriving in Chicago. Hemon also displays his skills in the second story, as a he lightens up Vladimir's despair and little idiosyncrasies with a lot of humor.

The Lazarus Project starts in medias res; "The time and place, are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908, Chicago. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain, and now I plunge." Aleksandar Hemon masterfully interweaves two stories in this book. The first and most gripping one is the killing of the young Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch. Lazarus escaped the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, only to get shot by the Chicago chief of police in 1908 (for a bit of historical background see [...]). It is not clear what why the young Lazarus was shot. What is beyond doubt, however, is that turn of the century Chicago was marked by civil unrest following the Haymarket riots. Xenophobia abounded and cool heads did not always prevail. Hemon sketches a very delicate and intimate portrait of the life of Averbuch's sister following the loss of her brother. The second narrative is the contemporary story of Vladimir Brik, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe in Chicago, but almost a century after Lazarus it is a very different city. Vladimir is writing a story on Lazarus but the reader gets the impression most of his energy is dedicated to finding some peace with his newly acquired and very comfortable life in the US. Using some grant money, he decides to travel to Eastern Europe to shed some light on Lazarus's life before arriving in Chicago. Hemon also displays his skills in the second story, as a he lightens up Vladimir's despair and little idiosyncrasies with a lot of humor.

One hundred years ago, a young man named Lazarus Averbuch, a Bosnian Jew and new immigrant to Chicago, knocks on the door of George Shippy, the Chief of Police. He is shot dead, accused of anarchist ties thanks to attending lectures by Emma Goldman. His wife Olga is forced to pick up the pieces alone: to find some solace and justice for Lazarus, to survive as a widowed woman, and to manage the ethnic tensions of living in a city with little tolerance for Jews, unwelcome immigrants and heterodox politics.

Brik, a modern newspaper columnist and Bosnian immigrant, becomes fascinated with this true story and decides to uncover more of its censored history. Feeling generally displaced by the path of his life, an uneager participant in an alienating marriage, he jumps at a grant that would allow him to travel and research both Lazarus's heritage and his own. Not to say he has particularly strong ties to Bosnia, but he capitalizes on the project to supplement his only half-hearted sense of immigrant otherness: "Just like everybody else, I enjoy the unearned nobility of belonging to one nation and not the other; I like deciding who can join us, who is out, and who is to be welcome when visiting."

So off to Bosnia! In the hopes of finding some "home," to lay down any firm ties (be they Bosnian or American), Brik travels with Rora, his decidedly Bosnian friend and tour guide. The original purpose of the trip --- a fact-finding expedition to Lazarus's hometown --- is soon left behind as Brik visits sites from his childhood and elsewhere in order to escape his American life and find something resembling a cultural identity. Rora is more or less like every oh-so-Eastern-European local, with an alien sense of humor and street-smart sensibility most recently incarnated in Jonathan Safran Foer's EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. While certainly the most stereotypical character in the novel, Rora's jokes and stories from his war reporting career brilliantly pepper Brik's already bizarre road trip. Rora and Brik's exchanges are both wildly comedic and deeply poignant as Brik gains some sort of understanding, even if he doesn't like what it is.

Complementing this narrative is a constant throwback to Olga in 1908, also trying to solve the mystery of Lazarus's death. Through brief imagined letters to her mother and conversations with Lazarus's friend hiding in an outhouse from the police, she is forced to come to terms with the fact of her immigrant otherness. This portion of the novel is told in a disarming present tense that makes even its historical parts come to life. Aleksandar Hemon absolutely nails the atmosphere of 1908 Chicago, showing with an impressive economy of words the scope of what has changed and what has remained the same.

At the heart of both these stories is Hemon's incredible sense of style. His prose bubbles and pops with originality and humor --- one-liners convey whole images and extended descriptions hone in on single moments. His dialogue manages to be completely naturalistic while also conforming to his stylized traveler/historian/Bosnian road trip aesthetic. And in his non-narrative passages, there is the perfect amount of reasonable self-consciousness to complement the seriousness: "What I like about America, I said, is that there is no space left for useless metaphysical questions. There are no parallel universes there. Everything is what it is, it's easy to see and understand everything." This claim rings both true and unbearably false, as Lazarus's, Olga's and Brik's experiences demonstrate. But witty paradoxes like this make up the soul of the text, which goes beyond the typical story of the immigrant experience into larger questions of how to find one's home, and what to do when one gets there.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

I initially disliked this book: a bit too self-indulgently Artsy with the proliferation of photos and the repetition of imagery (enough with the cans of sardines, already!). But, as you progress through this novel, the true beauty comes out -- and that is in the creation of a narrative voice that is self-aware, self-deprecating, occasionally annoying and almost cataclysmically alone. It is a brilliant study of displacement and solitude, of yearning for and ambivalence towards "home." And a fascinating view on the implications of "storytelling" in all its forms.

Don't waste your money. Hemon has offered no new insights on the tragic events that led to the death of Lazarus Averbuch. For Hemon to compare his experience to Averbuch's is absurd and an insult to all immigrants who truly suffered in their new homeland. Hemon experienced none of the starvation, back breaking work and violent death that Averbuch did. Hemon is an elitist snob. I can't imagine him having the stones to survive on his own in the US had he not married an American, thereby escaping the status of illegal alien.

Mr. Hemon has taken the historical mystery of the death of Lazarus Averbuch in 1908 and created a rich novel around it. His fictional hero, Vladimir Brik, is lost in America culture and in his life, and decides to solve the mystery behind the circumstances of Lazarus' death. The name Lazarus is a methaphor for the author who himself left the Balkans in the civil war of the 1990's, for Brik and for the New Testament Lazarus. Mr. Hemon is clearly writing about his former homeland when Brik returns there to solve the mystery. This is not a murder mystery (though it functions as one) but the tale of a man seeking his salvation and meaning of his life through the completion of a quest.

It must be both thrilling and anxiety-provoking for a young writer to find himself compared to Nabokov, Conrad and Rushdie with only one novel and a short story collection to his credit. Aleksandar Hemon, descendant of Ukrainian emigrants to Yugoslavia and a native of Sarajevo, Bosnia, arrived in Chicago for a 1992 visit just ahead of the Balkan war. It took him only three years to begin publishing stories in English, eight to issue his first book and 12 to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant."

Aside from the trick of writing in a non-native language, Hemon's not quite in a class with Nabokov and Conrad just yet. But there's no doubt he's become a fluent writer in English, and one that uses the language to unique and pleasing effects. Parallel plots concern the brief life of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jew and recent East European transplant who escaped a pogrom in Moldova only to be mistaken for an anarchist and shot down at 19 by Chicago Police in 1908; and Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian writer with Ukrainian roots who travels to the Ukraine and Sarajevo to research a book on Averbuch as well as his own ancestry.

This story is enlivened by Bosnian and Jewish jokes, and crucial catchphrases that grow in resonance with each reprise: "Home is where somebody notices your absence"; "I am just like everybody else because there is nobody like me in the whole world." The novel also notes the parallels between the U.S. war against anarchism a century ago and its war against terrorism today, without belaboring them.

The Lazarus Project is a story filled with death, despair, missed connections and aching ironies, that somehow manages to be full of humor and hope -- a neat trick whose secret must lie somewhere in Hemon's skilled use of his adopted language.