In two collections of stories, The Question of
Bruno and the NBCC-finalist Nowhere Man,
Aleksandar Hemon has earned unmatched literary acclaim and a
reputation
as one of the English language's most original and moving
wordsmiths.
In The Lazarus Project, Hemon has turned these
talents to an
embracing novel that intertwines haunting historical
atmosphere and
detail with sharp and shimmering—sometimes hilarious, sometimes
heartbreaking—contemporary storytelling.
On March 2,
1908,
nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a recent Jewish
immigrant from
Eastern Europe to Chicago, knocked on the front door of the
house of
George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police. When Shippy came
to the
door, Averbuch offered him what he said was an important letter.
Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice,
killing him.
When Shippy released a statement casting Averbuch as a would-be
anarchist assassin and agent of foreign political
operatives, he all
but set off a city and a country already simmering with
ethnic and
political tensions.
Now, in the twenty-first
century, a young
writer in Chicago, Brik, also from Eastern Europe, becomes
obsessed
with Lazarus's story—what really happened, and why? In order to
understand Averbuch, Brik and his friend Rora—who overflows with
stories of his life as a Sarajevo war photographer—retrace
Averbuch's
path across Eastern Europe, through a history of pogroms and
poverty,
and through a present-day landscape of cheap mafiosi and cheaper
prostitutes. The stories of Averbuch and Brik become
inextricably
entwined, augmented by the photographs that Rora takes on their
journey, creating a truly original,provocative, and
entertaining novel
that will confirm Hemon once and for all as one of the most
dynamic and
essential literary voices of our time.
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