IF YOU GO
Aleksandar Hemon appears 8 p.m. Tuesday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Free. 305-442-4408.THE LAZARUS PROJECT.
Aleksandar Hemon. Riverhead, 294 pages. $24.95.
A policeman sees -- or thinks he sees -- a weapon in the hands of a dark-skinned, would-be assailant. Shot are fired. The assailant dies in hail of bullets. In the weeks that follow, the cop is found not guilty of any charges and is vindicated by the courts and in the press, and protestors take to the streets with charges of police brutality and unnecessary force.
In The Lazurus Project, Aleksandar Hemon takes as his subject the real-life murder 100 years ago of a Jewish immigrant to Chicago. Lazarus Averbuch showed up one March morning at the home of the chief of police, where, taken for an anarchist subversive, he was gunned down. Perhaps it's ironic that the novel arrived in stores while the Sean Bell case was still making headlines; or maybe it just takes a writer of Hemon's prodigious talent to make evident the depressing, cyclical nature of history.
Hemon, like Averbuch, is a relatively recent arrival in the Windy City. He was visiting the United States in 1992 when the siege started in his hometown of Sarajevo, and he has lived here ever since. He wrote his first short story in English in 1995 and to date has published two widely (and justifiably) lauded short story collections, The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man. Along the way he has also won a MacArthur ''genius'' grant and earned comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov and the great Danilo Kis, who is an obvious influence.
For The Lazarus Project, his first full-length novel, Hemon appears to draw from his experiences as an immigrant to tell the story of Brik, a Serbian expatriate writer who becomes obsessed with the Averbuch case. Brik decides to write a book about what really happened to Averbuch, and he enlists the help of an old friend. Rora, another transplant from the former Yugoslavia, is a bon vivant photographer with a inexhaustible collection of colorful stories -- or, quite possibly, lies. Armed with a windfall of grant money, their first stop is the Ukrainian town where Averbuch lived before setting sail for North America.
That present-day plot tends to stall out here and there, lost in a maze of convoluted memories of Sarajevo, Chicago and elsewhere. We do learn though that Brik's integration into American life has been fraught with difficulty and dread, though in Hemon's telling, there's always an undercurrent of melancholy humor.
``One morning in Chicago I had tiptoes to the kitchen with the intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me.''
Hemon's chapters alternate between historical fiction set during Averbuch's time and the present-day adventures of Brik and Rora. A series of pictures culled from the archives of the Chicago Historical Society and by a contemporary photographer, one Velibor Bozovic, further smudge the lines between past and present -- and between history and fiction.
Brik's frequent lapses into memory and flashback can't hide the fact that little happens in this storyline. The buddy-movie trip comes to feel a little bit like a convenient way to pad out the more interesting, historical story. That's where Hemon's talents really shine. Averbuch's death devastates his sister, whose suffering is described in heartbreaking detail. Hemon's extensive research results in a beautifully rendered reevaluation of a previously misunderstand chapter in the history of immigration to America -- which is say, into the history of America itself. Like the fiction of Ha Jin fiction or Chris Abani, Hemon's best 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.
Andrew Ervin is a writer in Champaign, Ill.
