The Lazarus Project-By Aleksandar Hemon

I liked his recent book so much I picked up another from the library.

It is The Lazarus Project. The book opens with a nineteen year old Bosnian immigrant Lazarus Averbuch knocking at the door of the police chief of Chicago, George Shippy, to deliver a letter. The officer instead of accepting the envelope shoots the deliverer twice to kill. Almost hundred years since the killing a writer of Bosnian pedigree, Brik,  takes an interest in the murder to write about the truth in his new book. He must go to Bosnia to retrace the murdered man's history. But he has no money. An elderly rich lady offers him a grant to carry out the project; all expenses paid. The writer takes a photographer named Rora to accompany him.

I must say I was disappointed a little. The Bosnian trip did not add to the understanding nor the whys and wherefores of the incident hundred or so years prior. Except for the fact that the writer found graves of Averbuch's forerunners, the trip was made, it appears,  merely to provide the visuals of a ramshackle region of Eastern Europe. It created the pictorial history of the time when the project was undertaken; scenes of poverty, corruption, indifference, prostitution and everything else that goes with a society that is over run by powerful regimes. Was the trip taken to fill the pages with the descriptions only?  The book is roughly three hundred pages and half of it is about the trip itself with no detective work on boy's life before Chicago which was the intent of the trip.

Granted, the title has "Project" in its name. It is supposed to be a writing project. So thinking back, it is not supposed to have forensic features within its writing.  But a picture of an "Eye" on the cover misled me. 

I do believe part of trip could have been abridged.

I am charmed by this author's writing. The words and the style of their usage are just un-parallel. I have liked very few authors. Among them are Vladimir Nobokov, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John La Carre with few others and now Aleksandar Hemon. As a matter fact while reading the earlier book of his someone was quoted to have likened him to Nobokov. I disagree. I think he is more in line with John La Carre in that his weaving in and out of now and then, here and there is similar but quite remarkable. As much as I like La Carre I consider Hemon a notch better in that he does not lose the reader. He is constantly kept abreast.

I will definitely read other books by him.