Aleksandar Hemon
The Lazarus Project
Tonight, 7pm, Porter Square Books

Aleksandar Hemon’s a genius. Or at least the MacArthur Foundation thinks so. Hemon won one of the organization’s famed “genius grants” in 2004 to fund research for his latest book, The Lazarus Project, an exploration of immigrant identity. Given that it was grant-powered itself, the book creates an odd sort of meta-reality in that it’s about a writer creating a book (about immigration and identity, no less) thanks to a special grant. Wrap your head around that for a minute, and you’ll start to get the idea of Lazarus: a dreamy yet gritty tale of identity and exclusion tensed between multiple eras, touching on much but settling on little. Hemon will be in town to read from Lazarus tomorrow night at Porter Square Books, and Bostonist had the chance to talk with him about his project.

Like Hemon’s last book, Nowhere Man, his latest follows a character divided between Chicago and Sarajevo—not two cities you’d often associate with one another. The situation reflects the author’s own life—Hemon was born in Sarajevo and came to Chicago in 1992, where he was stranded when war began in Bosnia. Brik, the protagonist of The Lazarus Project, is in the same situation as Hemon. Having missed the war in Sarajevo, Brik feels disconnected from his ethnicity. Though he’s still an immigrant in America, his lack of war experience makes him something of an “immigrant” in his own country as well. Perhaps because of this dual displacement, Brik develops a fascination with the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who was shot to death by Chicago’s police chief George Shippy in 1908.

Lazarus had come to Shippy’s door bearing a package of unknown identity (something like the unattended baggage airport intercoms warn us about). His appearance caused an uproar and Shippy shot Lazarus, killing him. The death was played up as the assassination of a dangerous anarchist, and everything from Averbuch’s immigrant origins to his physical features was used to identify him as an anarchist and a threat to better-behaved, more “American” citizens.

Aleksandar Hemon encountered Lazarus’s story in the book An Accidental Anarchist and was deeply affected by the image of a dead Lazarus held up by the Chicago police chief. He was interested in the story but immediately knew that it would be “impossible to write about Lazarus without this photo,” which Hemon described as “amazing in its cruelty and blatant racism.”

Hemon felt that it would be difficult to tackle a historical situation successfully, citing a “trouble with historical fiction that simply pretends to be reconstructing the time and the place.” He wanted to avoid the “scant presence of history” in historical fiction, saying that there’s “something really false about [the genre]” and its tendency to use “paper cutouts of people” as characters. Hemon has certainly succeeded in creating real characters in Lazarus. Part of the success derives from framing the story in contemporary terms; by writing everything through Brik’s eyes, Hemon allows a 21st-century reader to see how one modern man is dealing with Lazarus and by extension become better able to understand the situation on a personal level.

More on Lazarus, Brik, and Hemon, including the infamous picture, after the jump.

Early on in The Lazarus Project, while he’s at a party schmoozing with the people who’ll decide whether he gets the grant to write about Lazarus, Brik runs into an old acquaintance, Rora. He describes how this isn’t unusual:

It happens to me all the time: I run into people I used to know in my previous, Sarajevo, life… Afterwards, a tide of crushing sadness always overwhelms me, for I instantly recognize that whatever had connected us has now nearly entirely dissolved… The old film of the common past disintegrates when exposed to the light of a new life.

The film metaphor is not accidental; this Rora is a photographer, and the click of his camera accompanies Brik throughout the book. Likewise, photographs accompany the reading experience: Hemon has used archival footage from the City of Chicago and new photographs from his friend Velibor Bozovic, who actually traveled with him to research Lazarus, to complement his writing. As Bozovic describes it on his website, “we were not in search of history but in search of a story” on the trip, and the duo came back with a good one.

The gritty black and white photographs are a compelling addition to a book that’s historically grounded but ultimately rooted in the relativism of personal, emotional experience. Unlabeled, the images seem to span time; it’s not always clear whether they’re from Lazarus’s day or the present. An image opens each chapter, sometimes with a clear connection to the chapter’s contents, sometimes providing only a vague sense of the characters’ surroundings.

This vagueness is mirrored by the uncertain truth of some stories in the book. Though Brik is a reasonably reliable narrator, his friend Rora is the ultimate bullshitter, and spends much of their journey sharing stories that could not possibly be true—or can they? Rora tells many jokes about the Bosnian experience. Always starring Mujo (a common joke name in Bosnia), the jokes are not so much funny as often devastatingly sad. In one, Rora tells how Mujo points out to his friend a beautiful mansion, family, and wife, claiming them as his own. When another man emerges onto the scene and caresses the wife, Mujo’s companion asks him, “Well, who’s that?” Mujo says, “That’s me.” The issue of searching for a concrete identity in the face of uncertainty is not new, but Lazarus explores it in fascinating new ways.

Hemon describes Bosnian society as significantly different from American; these differences in part necessitate imaginative storytelling Rora’s. Calling Bosnia a “particular type of society in which the connections are tighter between people,” Hemon says that “people know everything about you.” They’ve “already heard all of your stories so you have to tell them some other stories,” which may be invented. This Bosnian “storytelling instinct” contrasts with Americans’ desire for nothing but the truth. In a press interview, Hemon described “the notion of immigrants as foreign bodies contaminating America” as “closely related to the fantasy of American innocence and inherent goodness.” Brik’s American wife, Mary, not only refuses to believe some of his Bosnian stories; she actually seems offended that he could could be capable of uttering words that aren’t 100% true. A surgeon, Mary is interested in precision and the clear-cut; she has no space in her heart for the uncertainty of the past, and this drives a wedge between her and Brik, who is in a sort of limbo concerning his own identity: American? Bosnian? Something else entirely?

Hemon contrasts the safe, high-tech life of Americans with the more emotional experience of Bosnians, saying “they [Bosnians] have things to talk about… too many wars, too many tragedies, and such things generate stories.” Adding, “in some ways if you’re a storyteller you want to have an interesting life,” Hemon is quick to clarify that “I would never wish for war so I could tell stories.” Still, sometimes the best stories (like Lazarus) come out of great tragedies; Hemon says, “I do find that often stories of [Eastern Europe and the Middle East] are more interesting than the stories you can find on MySpace.”

Many of the stories that do get told on a consistent basis in America today are told by journalists, who purport to be revealing the truth. Lazarus features two journalists named Miller, one from Lazarus’s day and one from the war in Bosnia, both of whom cater to powerful interests. Describing the purpose of the two Millers, Hemon says “one of the ideas is that there’s a certain type of journalist the type that always defers to power in any given context, that always clings to the powerful ones and reports what the powerful ones tell uncritically.” “Miller is transhistorical,” and the broad relevance of his character forces people to “look at the ways that truth is constructed differently” in different contexts, eras, and so on.

In many ways, Hemon’s book has nothing to do with the current state of society: the war in Iraq and the war on immigrants. His work is about an entirely different war, different immigrants, different geography, different life experiences. But the message is still relevant: immigrants are people, war is awful, tragedies leave us flailing, no one is completely sure of anything at times. Hemon’s friend, the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, wrote this poem:

(Something I didn't know)

That day — he says — according to
every law of war the city should have fallen

The work of Hemon and Mehmedinovic exposes the obvious: that war is lawless, unpredictable, incapable of being roped in, directed, or understood—even by those who are “in charge.” All that remains is our own humanity and our ability—duty, even—to reflect, to make art, to make meaning out of the worst parts of ourselves, to tell stories. Still, we should press on, writing about and reflecting on experience, making art of the artless, searching for meaning in the worst parts of humanity. It’s what Hemon does, fearlessly and nearly flawlessly, and we all have something to learn from his example.