The Lazarus Project (urspr publ 2008; utgåvan 2009)

My first reaction is that I disliked (heartily) the first-person narrator's slow, slow melancholy. As the book progressed, that melancholy seemed to be the book's purpose - or even to be its own character. His refusal of optimism and just how much of his history is responsible for it are my main takeaways.

The narrative of Olga's crushing anguish interested me much more than the narrator's. ( )

I was racing through this book when I was sidelined by the global pandemic inability to concentrate. I stuck with it, though. Perhaps a bit too bleak for a lockdown read but it's my kind of thing. Person investigates an historic episode (though different, think Laurent Binet's HHhH or Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time) while dealing with their own stuff. Recommend. ( )

Sounds interesting and probably could have been, had I been able to completely follow the storyline. I listened to this on audio and it was impossible to follow. It's a dual time line with some characters by the same or like names. There were no chapter numbers, no chapter titles, and therefore when listening I was not sure if I was listening to the 1903 setting or the 1968 setting. The 1903 story is one of the killing of Lazarus, a Bosnian immigrant to Chicago. The 1968 setting is one of author Vladimir Brik (an immigrant from the Ukraine) who stumbles upon the story of Lazarus and wants to write a book about it. The story jumps back and forth between the two settings and therein was the problem for me. I read the entire book, but wanted to quit more than once, thinking I would finally make the connections; but sadly, that never happened. ( )

Lazarus Averbuch survived a Ukrainian pogrom, but in 1908 he's shot by the Chicago Chief of Police in the entry of the Chief's home. A century later, Vladimir Brik, an immigrant from Bosnia now married and living in Chicago, becomes interested in Averbuch and decides to write about him, sending him to Eastern Europe along with an old friend from Sarajevo, a photographer who survived the war there.

It's impossible to communicate how very brilliant and well-constructed this novel is without going into far too much detail. There's a lot going on, but it's so well-juggled that each thread shines on its own, and enhances the book as a whole. There's much about the life of Eastern Europeans in Chicago along with the nascent labor movement, the war in the former Yugoslavia and how one man survived, the memory of the Jews of Moldova and Ukraine, the current state of life in those two countries, and a recent immigrant's struggles to belong to the new life he finds himself in. Aleksandar Hemon's writing style is razor-sharp and tinged with a black humor. ( )

Brik, a young writer in Chicago, travels through Eastern Europe with his friend Rora, tracing the life of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant who lived in Chicago until he was shot and killed by George Skippy, the chief of police, when Lazarus had attempted to deliver the officer a letter.