THE LAZARUS PROJECT by Aleksandar Hemon

Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian native living in the U.S. with his neurosurgeon wife, has decided to write a book about Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish man who was killed under suspicious circumstances a century earlier.  Brik uses grant money to research Averbuch’s history in the Balkans, accompanied by an acquaintance from Brik’s Sarajevo days, Rora, a photographer.  The timeline here is fluid, to say the least, as the storyline oscillates between Averbuch’s story and Brik’s travels, which sometimes involve border crossings in cars with reckless drivers who frown on seatbelts.  At times, I got bogged down in the unfamiliar history of the breakup of Yugoslavia, and my attention span waned.  Hemon, however, is quite the wordsmith, especially given that English is not his first language.  For example, here are a couple of my favorite passages.  On page 229, we have the sentence, “Her hair seemed to be ponytailed to the point of pain.”  I love this visual and always admire an author who can convert a noun to a verb with such a vivid result.  Then on page 263, Hemon writes, “The bathroom walls were daubed over with various venereal diseases; the lines between the tiles brimmed with unspeakable ecosystems.”  The image may be yucky, but the metaphors are marvelous.