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A review by dontpanic42
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
Did not finish book.
I feel like this is a book I should have liked, dealing as it does with the immigrant experience in America (one of my favorite topics). But as hard as I tried, I simply could not get interested in this novel. I made it about halfway through before finally calling it quits.
The story (as if you couldn't get the summary from anywhere else) is in short about an aspiring writer (our narrator) in the present age who gets a grant to research and write the story of Lazarus Averbuch, an immigrant who was shot and killed while trying to give a letter to a police officer in Chicago in 1908. The author travels back to Europe with an old friend, Rema, as he explores the trip an immigrant would have taken, as long as his own roots. Blah blah blah.
As it turns out, what this is really is the lame excuse for a novel that simply describes what Hemon himself went through--getting a grant to write the story, etc. And instead of getting what might be an interesting story about this immigrant in 1908, we are left to read mostly about Brik (the narrator) and his own experiences, which turn out to be very dull. In fact, Brik himself points out a number of times that he's not a good storyteller, that his friend Rema is the better storyteller--well, maybe he should have left Rema to tell this story.
The characters in the novel are underdeveloped and, more importantly, just not that interesting. And the writing itself is annoying. Hemon's language is awkward, and he often chooses words that distract rather than enlighten. At one point that stands out in my memory, he describes a man as "edentate." What's wrong with "toothless"? Some writers make great use of a broad vocabulary (see, e.g., Tom Robbins), but Hemon sounds as if he were sitting down with his thesaurus, and the effect is language that gets in the way of his storytelling.
And as a total aside, what the heck does Hemon have against using quotation marks in his dialogue? It's just another pretense among many that get in the way of enjoying this book.
The story (as if you couldn't get the summary from anywhere else) is in short about an aspiring writer (our narrator) in the present age who gets a grant to research and write the story of Lazarus Averbuch, an immigrant who was shot and killed while trying to give a letter to a police officer in Chicago in 1908. The author travels back to Europe with an old friend, Rema, as he explores the trip an immigrant would have taken, as long as his own roots. Blah blah blah.
As it turns out, what this is really is the lame excuse for a novel that simply describes what Hemon himself went through--getting a grant to write the story, etc. And instead of getting what might be an interesting story about this immigrant in 1908, we are left to read mostly about Brik (the narrator) and his own experiences, which turn out to be very dull. In fact, Brik himself points out a number of times that he's not a good storyteller, that his friend Rema is the better storyteller--well, maybe he should have left Rema to tell this story.
The characters in the novel are underdeveloped and, more importantly, just not that interesting. And the writing itself is annoying. Hemon's language is awkward, and he often chooses words that distract rather than enlighten. At one point that stands out in my memory, he describes a man as "edentate." What's wrong with "toothless"? Some writers make great use of a broad vocabulary (see, e.g., Tom Robbins), but Hemon sounds as if he were sitting down with his thesaurus, and the effect is language that gets in the way of his storytelling.
And as a total aside, what the heck does Hemon have against using quotation marks in his dialogue? It's just another pretense among many that get in the way of enjoying this book.