THERE could never be another James Joyce. The literary market, saturated as it is, would not respect one ultra-subjective internal monologue above the hundred others on the pile.
Hence, when the narrative of this new novel is the spiteful wallow
of a self-obsessed Bosnian immigrant in America, it would take a serious innovation to justify a book that makes so few attempts at reconciling this alienation. Yet page after page, the reader is treated to adjectives dripping with morbid existentialism.
The main character, Brik, is a writer in Chicago who watched the 1990s war in his homeland Sarajevo from afar. Affected by the superficiality of his American life, Brik becomes fixated upon an obscure, uncoverable incident from the past as the basis of a book. Mainly with his imagination, he pursues the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a young anarchist from Sarajevo who moved to Chicago in 1908 to escape a similar pogrom threat, only to be killed by the Chicago Chief of Police. Through several manipulations, Brik secures funding for a self-indulgent quest to travel back to Sarajevo in a research project which ultimately results in a tragedy framed by Hemon in a chillingly disinterested play of tenses.
This is Hemon at his most fascinating. Flashes of brilliance appear in The Lazarus Project when syntheses of past and present are made through a chaotic cocktail of tenses. Unfortunately, Hemon at his least fascinating incorporates pockets of sense in this world being marvelled upon with all the un-ironic earnestness of the awful Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett attempt at the postmodern Hollywood movie, Babel.
The problem is I cannot think of a reason that would make the reader take up The Lazarus Project. What can be gained from another lament of disconnection in a postmodern world? Ironically, the book becomes a symptom of the most mirthless aspect of the postmodern: a pastiche of the postmodern novel.
We are at a time of cultural evolution when the book is appealing less and less to people. A book about the parallels of postmodern subjectivity with the alienation of an immigrant that makes no apparent attempt to resolve this crisis is not the theme to change the market. Waiting for the Red Sea to part for one individual is an ideal not even Hollywood would sponsor anymore.
The full article contains 399 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
