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On March 2, 1908, 19-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe to Chicago, knocked on the front door of the house of George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police, for reasons lost to history. When Shippy came to the door, Averbuch offered him what he said was an important letter for him. But instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him.
When Shippy released a statement casting the foreigner Averbuch as an anarchist who had intended to assassinate him, America was ready to agree. It was a time when Chicago was still recovering from the Haymarket riots; anarchism and, especially, foreign-tongued immigrants were the big scare of mainstream America. A new wave of xenophobia was already sweeping through Chicago and the rest of the country when the Averbuch shooting set off a tumult that would involve Emma Goldman, marches in the streets, and a rash of scare headlines from coast-to-coast.
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 Lazarus, Brik and his friend Rora - who overflows with stories of his life as a Sarajevo war photographer - retrace Lazarus's path backward across Eastern Europe, through a history of pogroms and poverty, and through a present day of cheap mafiosi and cheaper prostitutes. The stories of Lazarus and Brik become inextricable 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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“Masterful … Ingenious…Whether describing turn-of-the-century Chicago, with its mean tenements and decrepit outhouses, or the ‘onionesque armpits’ of a Moldovan pimp or an ‘unreal McDonald’s’ in Moldova, ‘shiny and sovereign and structurally optimistic,’ Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: The novel is full of jokes and linguistics riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov.”—Washington Post Book World
“Hemon’s self-assured first-person narration has resulted in a tightly woven novel, a physical, historical, and pre-eminently psychological journey…His prose is beautiful and imperative.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The Lazarus Project is the fearless and spirited expression of a turbulent literary talent and, at the same time, a cold, fierce blast of moral outrage. For all Hemon’s nods to other writers—one catches glimpses not only of Nabokov and Sebald but of Bulgakov, Pamuk, Amis, Poe—he is entirely his own man, an original who owes no debts to anyone.”—Bookforum
“A beautifully rendered reevaluation of a previously misunderstood chapter in the history of immigration to America—which is to say, in the history of America itself … Hemon’s work describes and defines what it means to be a new citizen in this land. Books like The Lazarus Project should make us glad he’s here.”—Miami Herald
“The Lazarus Project is a remarkable, and remarkably entertaining, chronicle of loss and hopelessness and cruelty propelled by an eloquent, irritable existential unease. It is, against all odds, full of humor and full of jokes. It is, at the same time, inexpressibly sad.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A measured, clear spotlight of injustice, made all the more eloquent by the prickly humor of the author.”—Los Angeles Times
“Hemon is immensely talented—a natural storyteller and a poet, a maker of amazing, gorgeous sentences in what is his second language.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“In [The Lazarus Project]…the search is not merely for the facts of one man's life, but for more complex truths about life and death, hope and despair, love and hate.”—The Boston Globe
“[The Lazarus Project] will challenge you to look closely at the world we inhabit. It will make you ask questions. Questions about death and life and remembrance. The kind of questions Hemon is known for. The kind we need more of.”—Esquire
“A profoundly moving novel that finds striking parallels between the America of a hundred years ago and now, as an immigrant Bosnian author, straining to come to terms with his identity, returns to his troubled homeland…A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality.”—Kirkus Reviews
“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.”—The Sunday Oregonian
“A meditation on life and death and on the bonds between people, even people one has never met - perhaps even especially people one has never met…This is as engrossing a novel as I've read in some time.”—Rocky Mountain News
“Hemon can’t write a boring sentence, and the English language (which he adopted at a late age) is the richer for it. . . . Antic and ingenious.”—Gary Shteyngart, The New York Times Book Review
“[With The Question of Bruno] Hemon proved himself as inventive as Nabokov or Salman Rushdie. He seemed, in other words, to possess the kind of bold talent that doesn’t come around very often. And in his follow-up book, Hemon again displays his prodigious gifts—nearly every sentence of this novel is infused with energy and wit. . . . A true original.”—Los Angeles Times
“Now here’s a reason to get excited: a true work of art that’s as vast and mysterious as life itself. This tender, devastating book is evidence indeed that Hemon is a writer of rare artistry and dept.”—Esquire
“An extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary.”—The New York Times
National Book Award: Finalist 2008
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