FICTION/NON-FICTION:THIS IS A BOOK about the writing of itself. Part fiction, part travelogue, part meditation, it tells of the twinning of two lives - the narrator, Brik, a grant-supported Bosnian writer living in present-day Chicago, and a Russian Jewish immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch, resident of the same city at the turn of the 20th century.
Here are the facts. Averbuch went to the house of Chicago's chief of police, George Shippy, on the evening of March 2nd, 1908, bearing a letter. The young man was admitted to the house and shown into the dining room. But Shippy, seeing the young man's "foreign cast of features" and given the political ferment of Chicago at the time (the communist Emma Goldman was about to visit the city), believed he was an anarchist about to assassinate him. So he reached for his pistol and killed Averbuch. The rest is fiction.
Brik is on a tour of eastern Europe, tracing Lazarus Averbuch's journey - from the town in Ukraine where he was born to the refugee camp where his family fled after the Kishinev pogroms and then to the ghettoes of Chicago, now paved over, where he ends up working as an egg packer. Accompanying him is a photographer, Rora, a childhood friend and a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo. He's a teller of tall tales, a familiar product of war; a black marketeer, a con artist, an adrenalin junkie fuelled by vendettas that become horrifyingly concrete at the end of the book.
There are three time-lines at work here - Averbuch's narrative as imagined by Brik, Brik and Rora's travels through Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Bosnia, and Rora's memories of the siege of Sarajevo. (In an eerily topical note, Radovan Karadzic is mentioned frequently, as an object of intense hatred.) The effect is slippery; think Paul Auster transplanted to Europe. Only as the self-conscious narrative builds does it become clear how the stories overlap. The word "project" in the title gives the clue; this novel (if it is a novel) is more about the authorial process than the narrative outcome: "Many of those stories turned unnoticeably into a dream, whereby the narrative went completely haywire and I became a confused character within it, unable to escape the plot."
Brik uses biographical details close at hand to bulk up the fiction he is creating about Averbuch. Hence, in Rora's past there's an American war correspondent named Miller who turns up in Averbuch's story as the Chicago Tribune hack who covers the killing. Or is it the other way round? The narrative is peppered with such echoes - Averbuch's sister Olga's devotion to her brother is mirrored in Rora's bond with Azra, the sister who raised him.
There's a great deal of raising up in this book. Brik attempts to resurrect Averbuch from the grave of history, Rora relives a dangerous past with his extravagant siege narratives. Even within the obviously fictional framework the hall of mirrors effect persists. In one of the most poignant passages of the book, Averbuch's sister Olga writes to her mother in the Ukraine to break the news of his death. "As it travelled, Lazarus was still alive for her; she worried about his working so hard, about him walking out in the cold with his hair wet, about his congenital sadness . . . Then she got the letter from Olga and read it and reread it, arguing against it, thinking up misunderstandings that could be undone so he could be restored to life." Brooding black-and-white photographs accompany Hemon's narrative, much in the style of the work of W G Sebald. Some are from the Chicago Historical Society archive; others, uncaptioned, taken by Velibor Bozovic (the author's best friend), double up as the pictures Rora might have taken in the fictional narrative.
Aleksandar Hemon's language is lush and rich and full of the unexpected conjunctions of a writer working in a second language. Rare words appear - edentate, piceous welkin - that had this reader reaching for the dictionary. Hemon's outsider observations, through his narrator, Brik, are acute and thought-provoking. Here he is on the American Dream: ". . . the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity". His evocation of Eastern Europe, the grubby monolithic hotel rooms, the garish casinos, the murky, ill-lit streets, the criminal taxi-drivers negotiating "the corrugated patches of careless road" attest to a novelist's talent for the precise and telling image. But the end result of the project is self-admitted imaginative failure; the impossibility of conjuring up the lives of the dead through the places they have inhabited. "I felt as though I had achieved the freedom of being comfortable with the constant vanishing of the world," Brik writes at the end of his odyssey.
Any reader expecting a standard historical novel will be severely disappointed in The Lazarus Project. ( I must admit to severe pangs of disappointment that I never discovered what was in that letter Lazarus Averbuch wanted to deliver.) But Hemon's narrative is not meant as a literary whodunnit but as a genre-bending exploration of form and of the mercurial and self-referential nature of writing fiction.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and short story writer. She currently holds the Jenny McKean Moore Chair in Creative Writing at George Washington University, Washington DC
The Wasted Vigil By Nadeem Aslam Faber, 372pp £12.99