The Lazarus Project is ...

The Lazarus Project is the second novel by Aleksandar Hemon I'm reading. Still on the first half of the book, but I can sense it's not going to be as enjoyable as the first one I read, The Question of Bruno.

Here's an excerpt of Bruno (its first paragraph): We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the revolution, steaming and steely, like a locomotive; songs about striking miners burying their dead comrades. By the time we got to the coast, I had almost lost my voice.

The rest is as good as this. Top notch.

And let me repeat now something I wrote about that book in a previous blog (back in 2006):

Hemon's book is superb. It is also the saddest book I have ever read. There's a story in it called A coin whose reading may easily bring tears in your eyes. Had I not read it at Heathrow Airport's lounge, surrounded by strangers, I'm afraid I would have cried. It's the least you can do. The siege of Sarajevo back in the 1990s is still stored somewhere in my memory, thanks to the ample news coverage it got on TV back then. The snipers, yes, they were the distinctive face of horror during the long siege. The mind, though, manages to forget fast. The TV footage of dead bodies on the ground, shot dead down by skillful snipers, was rapidly replaced by other similar images of gore and dread, from other wars, from other hells. Hemon's story has a purpose: it brings into focus what ordinary life must have been like in Sarajevo during the siege, anything but ordinary. That was something I didn't seem to imagine nor grasp (an average spectator) despite the images on the TV screen, despite the famous scene at the main city market, the aftermath of a blast, with dozens of corpses lying on the ground. I was never concerned about the stories behind the scenes, I never even cared about them. Hemon's aim and focus turns out to be hard to deal with; the zooming in is brutal, sharp, accurate by many e-folds, the uneasiness is notorious (the writing needling your skin like a pointed harmful weapon - I saw deluges of blood coming out of svelte bodies. A woman holding on to her purse while her whole body is shaking with the death rattle. I saw blood-streams spouting out of surprised children, and they look at you as if they'd done something wrong - broke a vial of expensive perfume or something. ), the casual becomes relevant, the plot, the whole scene, tearjerking.

It occurs to me that an airport lounge is perhaps an excellent place to read this story - the location enhances the difference, highlights the misty thin line which separates the normal from the bizarre, a line so often crossed in the wrong direction throughout history. I lifted my eyes from the book, my mind shattered. Yes, I was surrounded by strangers at the lounge, by tired people sleeping awkwardly occupying the space of three consecutive seats, by flocks of young Americans going out to provinces (cause they just happen to be there) from the land of the free (rucksacks strewn about, casual clothes on, sandals, bare feet crossed over the top of the back-packs, animated chatter), by lonely readers reading, by middle-age Spanish couples in large groups, still little accustomed to travel abroad. I was, in short, surrounded by ordinary people with a common, trivial aim: to go from Place A to Place B without the slightest concern for the open space in between. Safely, just as one wouldn't do it if one were a sniper's target.