The
Lazarus Project reveals that history is a web upon
which everything happens at once. Aleksandar Hemon weaves
together the 1908 shooting of Lazarus Averbuch, the
late 20th century madness of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the
razing of the Twin Towers, the War on Terror, and our
million-year addiction to racism and fear-mongering.
The warp and weft of this astounding novel is so tight,
so sure that one cannot leave Hemon's pages unenlightened
to the truth—as one of his characters sees it—that
“Every time, you think maybe this here is a different
world, but it's all the same: they live, we die. So
here it is again.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aleksandar Hemon is the author
of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man,
which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992,
intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was
there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable
to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English
in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003
and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur
Foundation in 2004. He lives in Chicago with his wife
and daughter.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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 Lazarusas 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 Averbuchas 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.
