“Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.”
Work
In two collections of stories, The Question of Brunoand the NBCC-finalist Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon has earned unmatched literary acclaim and a reputation as one of the English language's most original and moving wordsmiths. In The Lazarus Project, Hemon has turned these talents to an embracing novel that intertwines haunting historical atmosphere and detail with sharp and shimmering-sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking-contemporary storytelling. On March 2, 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a recent Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe to Chicago, knocked on the front door of the house of George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police. When Shippy came to the door, Averbuch offered him what he said was an important letter. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him. When Shippy released a statement casting Averbuch as a would-be anarchist assassin and agent of foreign political operatives, he all but set off a city and a country already simmering with ethnic and political tensions. Now, in the twenty-first century, a young writer in Chicago, Brik, also from Eastern Europe, becomes obsessed with Lazarus's story-what really happened, and why? In order to understand Averbuch, Brik and his friend Rora-who overflows with stories of his life as a Sarajevo war photographer-retrace Averbuch's path across Eastern Europe, through a history of pogroms and poverty, and through a present-day landscape of cheap mafiosi and cheaper prostitutes. The stories of Averbuch and Brik become inextricably entwined, augmented by the photographs that Rora takes on their journey, creating a truly original, provocative, and entertaining novel that will confirm Hemon once and for all as one of the most dynamic and essential literary voices of our time.
Quotes
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Aleksandar Hemon
Canonical work source
“Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.”
“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.”
“It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.”
“Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.”
“When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.”
“I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me,...”