A storytelling code of solidarity

The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon, is a kind of road trip — physically through Eastern Europe, but also through the narrator's immigrant experience and his marriage, with the ultimate destination being Chicago a hundred years ago, where Lazarus — Moldovan Jew, survivor of pogroms, alleged anarchist — was shot dead upon entering the home of the chief of police. Only past and present slowly get all mixed up and collide and disintegrate before we're ever fully there.

I think this novel knows that it can't bring the past to life as richly as it deserves, that that's not its strength, so it stops trying after a few chapters. Instead it becomes a novel about trying to write that novel.

I used to tell stories to Mary, stories of my childhood and immigrant adventures, stories I had picked up from other people. But I had become tired of telling them, tired of listening to them. In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of doing it — Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners' attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity — you did not sabotage someone else's narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story and, maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth — reality is the fastest American commodity.

Just as Hemon is both American and something else, this novel is something of a hybrid — over-the-top storytelling with injections of reality, or vice versa. Only sometimes you can't tell which parts are which; that's one of the problems when your particular reality includes things like pogroms or war.

The book also includes photos, which, ironically, while they are a permanent record of reality, seem entirely disconnected from the reality portrayed in the book; they have to be storytold into the narrative, since they are not able to speak for themselves.

This book appealled to my intellect many times over — in fact, I read this novel relatively slowly, pausing to think about what I'd read. Every day a new passage would leap out that demanded to be chewed over, shared with others. However, I never really connected with this novel, despite it bearing all the marks of being something I would love. I admire it greatly, but it turns out I don't care for it much.

The Lazaraus Project online
See also: The Paris Review
Bookslut: An interview with Aleksandar Hemon

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This was no comfort food

I was having a Big Mac, large fries, and a large Coke. Rora got McEggs and a milk shake. We sat outside and ate quickly, greedily. This was no comfort food; it was food that implied that there had never been and would never be any need for comfort.

— from The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon.

I've been turning to a great deal of comfort food these last weeks, a need brought on by work stress and migraine. A lot of my comfort food consists of (what some would consider to be weird) Polish things, like beet soup (even if it is instant) and cottage cheese mixed with radishes. But I derive genuine comfort from these and other foods, by their association with comforting times, often childhood and being cared for.

But I suppose there are other foods (potato chips come to my mind) that are perhaps similar to the kind of food Hemon alludes to in the above passage. Something that implies abundance and normalcy, possibly waste and the unnecessary; the everyday, like everybody. Which is still a kind of comfort I suppose. Hemon has made me realize that there are different qualities of comfort imbuing my foods.

Are your comfort foods truly comforting, or are they like Hemon's Mc-non-comfort?

What I can see is what I am not

Rora put his black Canon down in his lap, then under the table. He snapped a picture of the graces' legs, covering the click with a false cough.

Why did you take that picture?

That's a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.

Why do you take pictures?

I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.

It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.

So what?

So nothing, I shrugged.

They can look at the picture and remind themselves.

But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?

I see the picture, Rora said. What's with these questions?

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.

Drink more coffee, Brik, Rora said. It will pick you up.

The waitress came by with our coffees, so I drank more of it.

— from The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon.

There's something about taking pictures that removes you from the moment, yet it's often all that remains of the moment once it has passed. When I look at pictures I've taken, no matter how poorly framed, how badly lit, I see idealized moments, not real ones. What do you see when you look at a picture you took?

Going out with your hair wet commonly results in lethal brain inflammation

Americans, we are bound to agree, go out after they wash their hair, with their hair still wet — even in the winter! We concede that no sane Bosnian mother would ever allow her child to do that, as everybody knows that going out with your hair wet commonly results in lethal brain inflammation. At this point I usually attest that my American wife, even though she is a neurosurgeon — a brain doctor, mind you — does the same thing. Everybody around the table shakes their head, concerned not only about her health and welfare but about the dubious prospects of my intercultural marriage as well. Someone is likely to mention the baffling absences of draft in the United States: Americans keep all of their windows open, and they don't care if they are exposed to draft, although it is well known that being exposed to severe airflow might cause brain inflammation. In my country, we are suspicious of free-flowing air.

— from The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon.

I go out with wet hair, but I usually tuck it into a beret — my head feels cold otherwise. I let my daughter out with wet hair all the time, and I feel like a negligent mother for it, not just because it's wet, but because we're so disorganized and rushed for time to have to even consider that as an option in the first place. No brain inflammation yet, but it could happen any day. Do you go out with wet hair?

Rainy afternoon

It's rainy and cold.

Before surrendering to a lazy day, I thought I'd give it one last shot to get the kid active, even though I didn't much feel like it myself.

"How about we go shopping for a skirt, like you wanted?" "No!" "What if we hang out at the bookstore?" "Yes!"

She never ceases to surprise me.

So we went to the bookstore.

I thought about buying a copy of The Train (Simenon) for myself, seeing as how my electronic review copy is set to expire in a few days and I have to have this book on my shelf. But more than that, I wanted to browse, to discover something.

I opened a copy of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, started reading it, and, three pages in, determined it was crap, or, at least, not for me, not today.

Here's what we bought:

• The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, by George Beard and Harold Hutchins.
• Panda Man to the Rescue, story by Sho Makura, art by Haruhi Kato.
• The Lazarus Project, by Aleksander Hemon.

The Project's for me, of course, and I must say its first three pages were vastly more compelling than anything else in the store. Today anyway. It's been on that list in the back of my mind of books to watch for for some time, and it puts me in mind of that Doctor Who Episode, The Lazarus Experiment — I'm sure they have nothing to do with each other, but it's as valid a reason as any to choose one book over another.

Happy, rainy reading.