Hemon does a great job in juxtaposing stories of immigrants to America, but "The Lazrus Project" is not about "Immigrants to America." While the novel does forward pointed observations and sometimes less than subtle criticisms of political and economic power structures, this is a story centred around individual lived experience. I found it intense, and critical. The main character I think is a study in an unreliable narrator, especially regarding his brain surgeon (?!) American wife. There's a lot of hope-in-the-face-of-the-obliteration-of-history and the triumph of memory over forgetting, but the hardscrabble ways his characters achieve these lofty goals is very much rooted in daily life and has a good dose of wry humour. Yeep. My sister recommended this author to me, having seen and heard him at a book fair, in Paraty, Brazil. She didn't know this particular book, but recommended his more recent one, The Story of My Lives ( I may have the title wrong). I am now ready to read more by him. This book, The Lazarus Project, was a bit baffling to me at the beginning. I was enjoying the language and the two parallel stories, of Lazarus and the writer rick who is proposing to write Lazarus' story, but I couldn't see how the two connected until I got very close to the end. Then it came to me: the two main characters have in common escaping from a terrible occurrence and surviving with the guilt of knowing that their family, friends, community have not been so lucky. Lazarus is a survivor of the 1903 pogrom in Moldova and Brick leaves Bosnia in 1992, just before the horrible genocide there. Both feel the burden of being a poorly understood immigrant. Brick is married to a wholesome woman from the mid-west, to whom he attributes the all-American qualities of goodness, honesty, naivete and self-righteousness. And also of not wanting to delve deeply into her husband's past, in the horror of what happened. brick, accompanied by a Bosnian friend and in the guise of researching Lazarus life, takes a trip that spans the Ukraine all the way back to Sarajevo and, in the process, learns about himself and how he must live from then on.
What do You think about O Projecto Lazarus (2008)?
Meaningful read. However, I felt waiting for something that wouldn't arrive.
—sujata
Probably won't get it if you can't relate with the immigrant experience.
—milo
I know this book is good, but it left me cold.
—alelupaz
