Aleksandar Hemon
Jill Owens, Powells.com
In 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a recent Jewish immigrant to Chicago who had survived one of the first pogroms in Russia, went to the house of the Chicago chief of police. His motivations are unknown. The police chief, afraid that Lazarus was an anarchist, shot him within minutes of answering the door. Lazarus's sister, Olga, was left behind to answer for her brother's supposedly communist sympathies, and the city was whipped into an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, patriotic frenzy, primarily by politicians and the media.
Brik, the narrator of The Lazarus Project, is a present-day Bosnian immigrant who is fascinated with Lazarus's story. Brik's marriage to Mary, an American, is on shaky ground, and when he secures grant money for his research, he takes the opportunity to travel across Eastern Europe with his old friend Rora in search of Lazarus's past and his own future.
Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project is partly about reconstructing Lazarus's story. But it is also a book about storytelling, about the nature of memory and reality, and about the relationship of America to the rest of the world, then and now. As Hemon says, "To think that reality is something that is simply out there, and that all you need to do as a writer is to describe it — that is far too simple."
Hemon, who came to the United States in 1992 from his native Bosnia and then stayed on after war broke out in Sarajevo, began writing in English in 1995. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004, and has drawn comparisons to Nabokov both because of his circumstances and his crackling, inventive, and blackly funny prose. The New York Times has called him "an extraordinary writer....not simply gifted, but necessary." Kirkus Reviews calls The Lazarus Project "a profoundly moving novel....A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality." Library Journal raves, "a novel worth reading with as much fire as its composition must have demanded." In our interview, Hemon discusses storytelling, canvassing for Greenpeace, Bosnian jokes, and his remarkable new work.
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"The Lazarus Project takes a healthy swing at the all-inclusive, the gripping, at the truly audacious....Hemon's is a majestic talent.... His prose gets stranger and sharper as it goes, which seems right for such a journey: The guide gets more firm as the cave walls light up and the shadows enlarge. It's the kind of thing only a full-fledged talent can do." Chicago Tribune
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"A profoundly moving novel....A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality." Kirkus Reviews
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"Now here's reason to get excited: a true work of art that's as vast and mysterious as life itself. Hemon...has quickly become essential in the way that, say, Nabokov is essential....This tender, devastating book is evidence indeed that Hemon is a writer of rare artistry and depth." Adrienne Miller, Esquire
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"Not just an extraordinary storyteller but an extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary." The New York Times Book Review
Jill Owens: How did you come across Lazarus Averbuch's story?
Aleksandar Hemon: A friend of mine gave me a book called An Accidental Anarchist
by Walter Roth and Joe Kraus, which is a historical account of the Lazarus Averbuch
killing and its aftermath. My friend knew I like to read history books just
for the hell of it. It's a small book, but it's very well researched, and the
story is very well told. I read it and found it extremely interesting. I also
found two photos of Lazarus in the book — including a photo of Lazarus,
dead, sitting in a chair — and they are in my book, also. It was those photos
that made me realize I wanted to write a book, and that I wanted to include
the photos in the book, and then I started plotting the way to do that.
Jill: I read that you went to Eastern Europe with a photographer friend, much
like Brik, to research the book. What was a memorable experience you had in
Eastern Europe during that trip?
Hemon: Yes, we went to collect impressions and experiences. I already knew
there would be two characters in that story line, the narrator and the photographer.
We would speculate what the two of them might think or see, or what kind of
photographs Rora might take.
The most memorable experience, if they can really be graded, was visiting the
Jewish cemetery in Chişinău, which used to be Kishinev. It's one of the most
amazing places I've ever been. Most of the cemetery had been destroyed by the
Soviets, but there's a little corner that is preserved. Some of the tombstones
are preserved; there is someone who is taking care of them. Some of them are
completely overgrown and ruined, and it's very hard to look at that. Many of
them were desecrated. Some had writing in Russian that said, "Do
not take down. There is family still."
If there is an entrance into the underworld, that is where it is.
Jill: There are some strong parallels, as Brik points out, between Lazarus's
time, where anarchists are presumed to be threatening America around every corner, and the present, where dissenting voices are seen as threatening and
unpatriotic.
Hemon: What I found interesting about the original Lazarus's story was the
rhetoric, which hasn't changed much, and also the need to have a foreign enemy
that could be cast as the opposite of us. That strategy has existed for a long
time; it's always been around. It has happened a few times between 1908 and
2008.
It's a useful strategy. It's not just an American strategy, obviously; a lot
of governments and people who like to stay in power cultivate their enemies.
It's easier if those enemies are somehow easily identifiable, and presumably
different than us, whoever we may be.
Those were things that interested me. But my primary interests were the tragic
story of Lazarus, and the story of his sister Olga, and the photos. There was
a cluster of interests that attracted me. Just one of them may not have been
enough, but the fact that all those were in that story, surrounding the Lazarus
Averbuch killing, attracted me.
Jill: Two of the photographs in the book are of Lazarus himself. Where do the
rest of the photographs come from?
Hemon: The archival photographs come from the archive of the Chicago Historical
Society, most of them from the collection that came from the Chicago Daily News,
which is long gone. The Chicago Historical Society has about thirty years of
photographs from the Daily News. It's immense; it's infinite. I looked through
their collection a number of times. It's an amazing place. Many of those photos
are from glass plates, not even from film.
The other photos came from our trip, from my friend Velibor Božović. He took
about twelve hundred photos, and then we picked twelve, from that mountain of
photos.
Jill: Olga is an incredibly poignant character; she is the lens for the human
reality of what happened to Lazarus. How did you approach writing her character?
Hemon: In the real account, Olga is a little less alone. There were people
who were trying to help her, though it did not work out too well. The same year,
she went back to Europe and then vanished from history, probably in the Holocaust.
It was a challenge for me to write about a woman. What I recognized, what I
thought I could write about, was her grief. Not that I had experienced that
kind of grief, but somehow I thought I could recognize and empathize with and
imagine it. I liked her love for her brother.
Jill: And Rora's character is fascinating. He's opaque, a reversal of Brik,
in many ways. He's also the primary storyteller in the book.
Hemon: Yes. I think of him as a kind of epic character — epic in the sense
that Ulysses is an epic character, or one of the heroes of the Iliad. When they
enter the narrative, they are already complete. They have no psychological trajectory
that takes them to that point in the narrative, wherever that point is. They
enter complete, and therefore their means of self-expression are either stories or actions. They tell
stories that are sovereign and self-sufficient. Or they act; they talk about
their actions.
That's the exact opposite of Brik, who is a pensive self-examiner. My idea
was to have those two poles, two opposite concepts of narration, be together,
experiencing things.
Jill: Rora doesn't need epiphanies, whereas Brik is constantly searching them
out.
Hemon: Right. Rora requires no understanding of the world around him. He knows
everything that needs to be known. Also, I think that's why he's a photographer.
Photography, in a sense, is always complete. You have to interpret beyond
the photograph, but the interpretation is not inherent in the thing itself.
That's why photography is a medium more conducive to Rora's use.
Jill: In a conversation with Nathan Englander published by Boldtype, you said,
"I think that on the one hand, generally, fiction helps constitute reality
— rather than reflect it." Various realities show up in this book — those
of memory, imagination, storytelling, or desire. How would you describe the
relationship between fiction and reality?
Hemon: They are continuous, in some ways. I don't think reality is self-evident,
what we call reality. Nabokov said it was a word that should be used only within
quotation marks. That doesn't mean that everything is unreal, or that everything
is equally real. It's far more complicated than that.
The point is that to understand reality, to recognize it as reality, we have to
narrate it to ourselves, so to speak, or to each other, in various ways. We
have to tell a story of reality to ourselves. A recent study in the New York Times showed that people apparently imagine
themselves as characters in the stories of their lives. That is, people construct
stories of their lives and tell them to themselves. In those stories, they imagine
themselves as heroic, or honest, and they try to act accordingly. If they don't,
they treat it as something that is out of character.
That also means that some stories may come from the outside, that they are
not absolutely original. There are models for these stories. The honest, decent
guys who invade foreign countries. A culture generates those stories, and we absorb
many of them passively. Many stories also come from books, but we modify them
so we can tell them about ourselves. In doing so, we constitute at least chunks
of reality in which we can live. To think that reality is something that is
simply out there, and that all you need to do as a writer is to describe it
— that is far too simple.
Things get even more complicated if you're talking about the past. That is,
the past as something that I have not experienced, something before me. How
do I relate to it, as a person? What kind of story can I tell about it? The
problem is not simply a matter of mental and intellectual acrobatics. If
we have a human need, as I think we do, to relate and empathize with and understand
other people's suffering, then how do we not turn someone else's suffering into
a conventional story of that suffering? How do we not dismiss it as something
that is equally real as some other story of suffering? That's a conundrum that
I as a writer had to deal with.
Jill: Brik's recollection ritual before he goes to sleep, in which he's trying
to control his memory of his life, reminds me of something Victor Plavchuk
says in Nowhere Man, describing a room in Ukraine. It had "bare walls:
although my memory keeps stretching on its toes to hang up a Lenin picture."
That seems to me one of the best depictions of the way memory, imagination,
and desire work together to create story.
Hemon: Yes. Memory is always incomplete. We always add things to it. It's impossible
to perfectly remember things that happen to us. The only way you can maybe reconstruct
it fully is in collaboration with other people. If my room right now is full
of people who are listening to this conversation, we would be able to reconstruct
this conversation better than if it was only the two of us.
Memory is always reinventing your experience as a story that you tell yourself.
When people imagine their life as stories, they also imagine their past life
as stories. They create their experiences to fit those story lines. That's exciting
for a storyteller. In other words, if you start recollecting, you might end
up telling a story, no matter what it is. But it also makes the past evanescent
and elusive, and that's a problem if you have a collective past to recount and
deal with.
Jill: Brik's relationship with his wife, Mary, is strongly connected to his
relationship with America itself.
Hemon: Brik says at one point, "How do I see America? I look to my left.
I look at Mary." That's part of the problem with their marriage. We never
really meet Mary. All we know about Mary is what Brik tells us, so the reports
on Mary are biased. But his problems with Mary and his problems with America
are to some extent interchangeable, and that is in some ways unjust to Mary,
but that is the way it is.
They have an argument about the Abu Ghraib pictures, because he somehow sees
her as representing America, which is of course not a tenable position, if you
are living with a person or if you love a person. That is their problem.
Jill: He seems drawn to her goodness, and her work as a neurosurgeon, but also
frustrated by her naivety.
Hemon: Yes, and he's frustrated by the fact that she's working and he's not,
too. Somehow he thinks that his perceived moral superiority could make up for
the absence of economic equality in the marriage. He sees her as someone
who is not so much naive, but who holds a belief which is widespread in America
that America is founded on good intentions, and what all Americans have are
good intentions. If we wage a war and kill a large number of people and torture
them along the way, that's out of good intentions. In other words, we are inherently
good, no matter what we do. Despite all the crimes that the government may have
committed, slavery, racism, wars, torture, lies, that's all not as bad as it
would be somewhere else, because we do have good intentions.
This is something I have encountered, not with my ex-wife, but just talking
to people. In some ways, you cannot blame people for that, people who believe
in the goodness of at least part of humanity. That's not something that people
should be beaten for. On the other hand, the end result of that is the Iraq
fiasco. Large numbers of people believe, "We are going there with good
intentions — what can go wrong?"
I believe it's the act that counts, not the intentions.
Jill: You do a wonderful job describing masses of people, picking particular
images out of a crowd in a way that conveys the crowd's diversity and scope.
The city of Chicago itself in the early twentieth century is almost a character
in the book. How has the city changed or stayed the same over the last century?
Hemon: In some ways it's changed dramatically, in that most of the landscapes
from the last century are completely gone. Nothing from Maxwell Street, the
Jewish ghetto, is retained. There are barely traces left.
What is the same is the inflow of immigrants who are interacting with the city,
which creates a particular kind of exciting energy for Chicago. For any big
city, for that matter, but Chicago is famously an immigrant city. I read once
in some Chicago publication that 120 languages are spoken in the part of the
city that I live in. That's amazing to me. I love that. I love that about Chicago,
I love that about cities.
Jill: What, if anything, do you think is being resurrected in this novel?
Hemon: In some ways, Lazarus and Olga and all those who died in the book are
temporarily and provisionally resurrected through storytelling. One of the powers
of storytelling is that it keeps people alive. Obviously their bodies are absent
and will never come back, but in storytelling, when you talk about other people's
lives, it's the Thousand and One Nights structure.
There's a great book that's just come out, by Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati.
I loved it, and it makes the same point about stories. (We're friends, but
we never talked about it before we read each other's books.) Stories on the
one hand stay a person's death — they postpone it, they defer it — but also
in those stories, the person lives more fully. That's a paradox; once people
are gone, all you can do is tell stories about them or not tell stories about
them. I like to tell stories about them. The resurrection can only be narrative.
Jill: In both Nowhere Man and Lazarus, you write of a "sneeze" of
joy and a "sneeze" of happiness. There is that sense, when something
joyful happens, of it being an unexpected, forceful event. Those jolts of humor
and levity are welcome in a book that deals with a lot of heavy subjects.
Hemon: Yes, just a momentary joy. It's elusive and evanescent; it just happens
and then it's gone. I can miss it sometimes, if I'm not careful. For instance,
you see a particular angle of light as you walk down the street, but if you
walk further, fifty yards down the street, you miss it. Or just the memory of
something, or the taste of an apple.
There is a whole industry in this country which is based on the belief that
happiness and joy could be organized activities. That if you set yourself in
a particular way, if you set yourself right, you'll be happy, morning to evening,
all day long. My experience of life is that you have moments of joy and moments
of sadness. You can be happy and then sadness overwhelms you; one can't go without
the other. I don't think I should work to eliminate sadness so I can live with
unlimited happiness.
Jill: In that same conversation with Nathan Englander, you tell a little story,
almost a joke, about shooting peasants instead of pheasants, which you describe
as "dessert after a heavy meal." Would you put the Muja jokes that
Rora tells in that same category?
Hemon: No. I like telling those jokes, but Rora also likes telling them. It
fits his character. Those characters, Muja and Suja, are stock characters in
Bosnian jokes. But also, in the second immigrant joke, Suja comes to America
and Muja shows him his house, and his bank, and his car, and his pool, and his
wife, and Suja asks him, "Who's that with her?" and he says "That's
me." The American dream often happens to someone else. You know the story,
but it's not happening to you, for a lot of people. Somehow it's still supposed
to make you feel better.
All those jokes are funny in Bosnian, obviously, but they also have something
to do with the whole situation of immigration in the book.
Jill: Your prose is so inventive, down to the sentence structure as well as
the actual language, that it makes reading a very fresh experience. To the
extent that you do, how do you think about your own prose?
Hemon: I don't really have a method that I practiced and started repeating.
The only way that I can describe it is that I hear my sentences as I write them,
and I write in longhand, so it's more immediate. When I read them again, I hear
them, and I can fine-tune them, quite literally.
I don't do that often, but just as an extreme example, there were sentences
— in this book, but in early books even more — where I actually counted beats
in the sentences. The music of it is very important to me. I have no way of
knowing whether the reader might hear the same kind of music, but that's what
I go by.
Music is an incomplete parallel, because the meaning obviously comes into play.
It's not just the sound. There's something that Russian formal literary theorists
refer to that could be translated as "making wondrous" or "making
miraculous" or "making strange." Here, it's normally described
as "defamiliarization," which is an entirely different point. But
they thought that literature does that by treating language differently than
the way that language is treated in everyday communication.
What I like to do, and this is where music fits in, is try to unpack the language
so that it's different from the way we talk, or the way that newspapers talk,
or television talks. It might put off a lot of readers, but what I want to say
can't be plainly said, sometimes. Often. Too often, perhaps.
Jill: That's interesting that you say that about counting beats in your writing,
because you mention poetry often in your books, and your writing is reflexive
in some of the same ways that poetry can be — a word or phrase will be repeated,
turned, with subtle shifts of meaning over time. Do you write poetry?
Hemon: I did write poetry, but it was really, really bad. You were right —
it was bad because I didn't do what you were just describing, which I try to
do in my prose. I suppose I have some amount of poetic instinct that I translate
into prose. I do read a lot of poetry, and I read it for pleasure, obviously,
but I also read it because I admire the way it puts pressure on language. I
love that.
Some of the writers that I like a lot like Nabokov or Michael Ondaatje, they
write prose like poetry (though it's not the only criteria). Ondaatje, in fact,
writes poetry as well. They put that kind of pressure on language. It's never
just reporting. It's never just descriptive. Language has a certain quality
in itself that is beyond descriptive, and in that situation, something transformative
happens, and that is what I like to think I'm after.
Jill: You mentioned Nabokov, who you're often compared to. Who else do you
consider your literary influences?
Hemon: I like writers who come from the Slavic language tradition. A lot of
Russians, and a Yugoslav writer who died in 1989, called Danilo Kis. I'm sure
he would have won the Nobel Prize and been a household name, had he not died.
I read him in our native language, the language that we shared. I also like
Isaac Babel. Chekov. He's not a master of language; Nabokov said, "Chekov's
sentences go to parties dressed in everyday clothes." But I love him; I
love his kindness and the way he loves his people, and how forgiving and smart
and generous he is.
Jill: I noticed the bartender in Lazarus's story was named Bruno Schulz.
Hemon: Yes, that's a quirk; there really was a bartender named Bruno Schulz
in Lazarus's story. It was one of those things I found when I was researching,
one of those signals that I should be writing this story.
Jill: How do you feel your writing has changed over the years?
Hemon: I used to be more impatient. That is how I describe it to myself. I
am more patient now. With the first two books, it was easier for me to imagine
that I would never write or publish a book again. Now I have been doing it for
awhile.
This book required — not exactly a different kind of writing, but I knew I
could not break it up into units that I could write and complete discretely.
I had to finish the book to see if it worked. The sum of parts would not have
necessarily fulfilled my purposes. My first two books were the sum of their
parts: a book of stories, and then the fragments and stories in Nowhere Man.
I had to be patient and keep at this book, and not get too frustrated when I
couldn't see the end or didn't really know where I was going.
I did have to write stories while I was writing The Lazarus Project. I wrote
a book of stories during the same time, which will be coming out next year.
As improved as my patience may have become, it wasn't perfect, so I had to see
something finished and published, and I would write a story every once in awhile.
If I learned anything writing The Lazarus Project, it is to take my time, to
wait for things to come to me rather than to push through them.
Jill: I've read that you intended to stay in America for only a few months,
and then the war started. Why were you coming to Chicago in the first place?
Hemon: I used to be a young journalist, and there was a program run by the
United States Information Agency, which is now defunct, I think. It was a cultural
exchange agency that used to run American cultural centers around the world,
which I don't think exist any more. They had a program where they invited people
from Bosnia, including young journalists, for a month-long visit at their expense.
I was invited, and I came and travelled for a month, as part of the program.
Then I stayed over with some friends in Canada and a friend in Chicago, and
when I was in Chicago visiting my friend, the war broke out, and I stayed.
Jill: Your characters have held interesting, and sometimes bizarre, jobs. I
was curious: what's one of the strangest work experiences you've had?
Hemon: I think canvassing, which I did for Greenpeace, was the weirdest. I
can't believe I did it. I can't believe I thought I could do it. But somehow
I did, for two and half years.
Jill: I've had friends who haven't lasted two and a half weeks canvassing.
Hemon: I know. I was desperate at that point. It burns you really badly. But
desperation is a great ally. It was the first legal job I got, though, so I
would not quit. I tend not to quit, sometimes. I got the job, then I held onto
it, and it was only when I found some other means of sustenance that I quit.
In retrospect, it was a stroke of good luck. I learned a lot of English, and
learned not to be self-conscious while talking, because I was meeting a lot
of people every day and talking to them. It was a crash course in the American
middle class, from lower middle class to upper, upper middle class. I met them
all and talked to them, all kinds of people, from psychopaths to the kindest
people you will ever meet. People with guns, and people who would invite me
into their houses and sit me down and offer me food, the nicest people. Crazy
people, Jesus freaks, whatnot. The whole shebang, I've seen it all.
Jill: Did you or do you play music? The band sections in Nowhere Man are quite
funny, and ring true.
Hemon: I used to have a band, and when I was writing poetry, nobody would read
it or publish it, and I thought I could turn it into lyrics. I always liked
music, so I had a band. In fact, the photographer, my friend that I went to
Eastern Europe with, was in the band too. We've done a few things together.
But I wasn't good at it, so I just turned to writing full-time. Before I came
to the United States, I sold my guitar so that I could have money here, which
I quickly spent. I've never picked it up again; I haven't played guitar since.
Jill: What are you reading these days?
Hemon: Right now I'm reading Howard's End, for whatever reason, and before
that I read Divisadero, by Ontaatje, which I loved. Before that I reread The
Hakawati — I had read it in manuscript — and before that, I can't remember.
I spoke with Aleksandar Hemon on the phone on May 14, 2008.
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