sunday salons

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

January 25, 2009

Video production by Skye MacLeod

The Lazarus Project, a widely heralded novel by the Bosnian writer, ALEKSANDAR HEMON is in part a mystery, in part an account of a search in the past and present for an answer. It has to do with the relation between a novelist's art and 'reality', with the ambiguities and the dark spaces in history.

Elaine Blair, writing in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, tells of the journey of Brik through Eastern Europe to capture the sufferings and horrors marking so much of its history. "But something else is articulated here besides Brik's pain and rage: a skepticism that has been building throughout his Eastern travels about the extent to which any of us can feel genuine sorrow over historical catastrophes that are well known to us but remote from our own lives."

What, finally, can fiction, can art in general do to overcome our numb sense of detachment from Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, not to mention the Holocaust? Questions like these are aroused by this book, questions that still need attention.

 

"What constitutes a home?' Is it land? Is it the city? Is it 'people? Is it a sense of connection with the culture? Is it defined by tradition or by daily practices of people? What is it that makes you feel at home? Is it your family, your friends, millions of people? And how does it work? It's a crucial question. And it's a question I don't know how to answer."
-Joseph O'Neill