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The National Book Award winner was just announced, and Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country came out on top. Good for him. I haven't read it. So I'm still saying Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, which was on the shortlist, should have won. Here's a review of it that I wrote, comparing it with Lolita. If you haven't read Lolita, either do so now, or skip down like two inches on your mouse-scroller thingy, or just read the whole post because it is, of course, incredibly insightful and whimsical and such and such.

AT THE beginning of his confession, Humbert Humbert rearranges the first name of the young nymphet Ms. Haze:

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

It's as if he's inverting piano chords, waiting to hear the correct resonance between tonalities before he can begin composing his masterpiece. Somehow, though, it seems he's looked at the keyboard, said, 'Okay, I get it,' and then created an altogether new triad ("Lo-lee-ta") from otherwise familiar notes.

If Nabokov (that suave Slav) had written Lolita without Monsieur Hum Hum, presumably there would still be a Lo, a Lola, a Dolly, and a Dolores - these are the monikers by which her mother and schoolmates define her. 'Lolita,' though - the name and the disease - is solely M. HH's invention, and therefore, one might say, solely his possession.

What's interesting is that he doesn't create Lolita by dreaming about her, by observing her closely, nor by talking with her. Rather, his obsession progresses when he writes about her in his diary. ("Friday. Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose. Why does the way she walks - a child, mind you, a mere child! - excite me so abominably?...Saturday. I know it is madness to keep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill to do so.") The act of writing makes his mania palpable: He can carry his diary and a pen with him wherever he goes; he can toy endlessly with words when Lolita herself isn't around to toy with.

So when he says, "She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland," he may as well be talking about how Lolita entered his lexicon. Language is his way of painting over this unfortunate girl, transforming her into something she isn't - from a coarse, spazzy pre-adolescent into an infatuating nymphet.

At first, Lolita is merely a story, a song, but as Humbert Humbert begins to act out his fantasies, she eventually becomes a real thing. He licks her eyeball (this is their first physical interaction), their relationship messily develops into something too adult, and finally HH is incarcerated. But even in prison he can't distinguish artifice from reality. "It has bits of marrow sticking to it," he says - not of Dolores Haze, but of his narrative. Words overwhelm, and therefore become, his world.

A SIMILAR, if less perverse, blending of art and reality occurs in The Lazarus Project, the recent novel by Aleksandar Hemon. Vladimir Brik is not as playful with his narrative as Humbert Humbert, but he nonetheless appreciates the potential of language, as the book is largely about how one can define one's reality and identity through speech.

The novel re-imagines the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a nineteen-year-old Jewish immigrant murdered in 1908 by Chicago's chief of police. But it's not that Averbuch's homicide actually happened that makes the story real, so much as Brik's retelling of it. Throughout, Brik questions what is fact and what is fiction, and whether it actually matters which is which: "There are moments in life," he says, "when it is all turned inside-out - what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent."
    
Like Hemon, and like the protagonist of Hemon's previous novel Nowhere Man, and like the principals in several of Hemon's short stories, Brik is an immigrant from Sarajevo currently residing in Chicago. When the war broke out in Bosnia in 1992, both the author and his avatar(s) found themselves marooned in the United States. Unable to return home, Brik quickly becomes an accidental American, struggling with his confused identity and emergent limitations of self-expression.

Brik's main problem is that he's something of a dreamer, and he feels that American life leaves little room for existential and emotional exploration. This often leads to squabbles with his American-born wife, Mary, a neuroscientist who seems to think in strictly mathematic, quantitative terms.

Brik writes a weekly column in The Reader entitled "In the Land of the Free," through which he relates his experiences as a foreigner in the United States. (It's well liked for its "quirky immigrant language.") Upon researching one of his articles, he stumbles upon Lazarus' story and feels compelled to write a book about it:

I wanted to be immersed in the world as it had been in 1908, I wanted to imagine how immigrants lived then...I had to admit that I identified easily with those travails: lousy jobs, lousier tenements, the acquisition of language, the logistics of survival, the ennoblement of self-fashioning.

Ultimately Brik ends up writing two narratives. The first is the one he originally conceived, the history and historical fiction of the events surrounding Lazarus Averbuch's murder. The second story is about Brik's own research, in which he travels to Eastern Europe with his photographer friend, Rora, presumably to learn about Averbuch's roots. The chapters alternate centuries - now we're in 1908, now we're in 2004 - but the two accounts end up sharing themes, thoughts, and characters, and eventually conflate entirely.

It is in this distillation that Hemon is at his most inventive, and where the book finds much of its remarkable power. In 2004 Chicago, for example, Bill and Susie Schuettler help Brik secure his research funding, which allows him to write his book. In 1908 Chicago, the officer leading the investigation of Averbuch's death is Assistant Chief of Police Schuettler. Likewise, William P. Miller, the Chicago Tribune writer who covered the Averbuch scandal, is cast in the 1990s as an American journalist in Bosnia writing about the war. Never are these connections explicitly mentioned - there aren't any self-conscious interior references, and the book doesn't need them - Hemon simply lets his characters (co)exist, leaving the reader to discover the correlations.

It gets trickier: When Brik first arrives in Eastern Europe for his research, he hears Madonna's "Material Girl" playing on the television. It's sung, via karaoke, by a "matronly woman in a curtainlike, glittery dress" whom Brik refers to as Madame Madonskaya. Later in the book (though temporally a century earlier), Lazarus Averbuch loses his virginity in a whorehouse whose dame is one Mm. Madonskaya. In the present again, Rora finds himself in a Serbian brothel, next to a passed-out prostitute "who styled herself after Madonna." This woman's name is Francesca. Then we find out Francesca is the name of the boat on which Lazarus travels to America. (Nabokov's chord - "Lo-lee-ta" - seems to be echoing.)

This is more than just clever wordplay. Before long, it becomes apparent that these similarities are all part of a larger theme of convergences. The continuity of narrative, signified by certain names and words, is how Brik reconciles being both American and Bosnian, living in both the past and the present, meandering between real and unreal. In Sarajevo

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.

Indeed, this book is one part Sarajevo and one part United States, one part fact and one part fiction. Because a novel can be written as truthfully as a history, Hemon seems to be saying, both are equally valid.

Finally, one takes into account the similarities between Brik and Averbuch. Both write for papers called The Reader. Both are Slavic immigrants to Chicago, wary of their new homes. As Brik notices their common roots, he realizes that they are not just alike, but that they are the same. His - and in the book, everybody's - identity is forged through histories intertwined as a clump of alfalfa sprouts - you can't pick out one without disturbing the rest...and they all taste alike: "They were me," Brik realizes while visiting a graveyard in Bosnia. "We lived the same life; we would vanish into the same death. We were like everybody else, because nobody was like us."

The danger is that the book may be more fun to think about than to actually read. While Hemon's prose is fluent, and even sometimes virtuosic - which is incredible, because he didn't learn English until after he immigrated - it is not without its blatant lapses. Every so often Hemon overindulges in his use of alliteration. In a public park, "birch branches beyond the bus" slump, forlorn; at family dinners Brik's father-in-law "would push a pea around his plate ponderously."

Furthermore, the narrative sleights invite close reading, which leads to a couple thematic dead ends. Before arriving at Chief Shippy's house in the book's first scene, Lazarus buys a package of sour apple candy lozenges in hopes of quelling of his hunger, which remains unsated. Throughout the book, several of the characters yearn for candy in hopes of alleviating hungers that can't be fixed, a slightly too obvious symbol for the allure of false sweetness. Similarly, one morning in his kitchen Brik mistakes a can of sardines for a can of 'sadness.' While it's rather charming the first time, the incident is drained of its novelty as cans of sadness keep popping up.

It seems Hemon has a penchant for thematic neatness, as Nowhere Man was also rife with symbols, all of which coalesced in a climactic scene that all but screamed, 'This is important! Underline it!'

NEVERTHELESS, many of Hemon's tricks are effective - especially, in The Lazarus Project, his toying with the importance of language, and its resuscitative abilities. It might seem coy or obvious to say that Lazarus Averbuch's resurrection is brought about by language. Any character in any book is created by language, so in a way this really isn't all that different. But just as Humbert Humbert acknowledges the efficacy of mots justes - "Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with" - so too does Brik consciously make note of their power.

Hemon pays careful attention to speech, and so should any reader of his last three books. The "acquisition of language" that an immigrant must undertake, in The Lazarus Project, is what separates citizens from foreigners, which Hemon might define as humans from non-humans.

Throughout the novel, Averbuch is mute. In some cases, as in the candy store encounter of the first chapter, he goes out of his way to remain unheard:

"Good morning," the woman says, haltingly, exchanging glances with her husband - they need to watch him, it is understood. The young man smiles and pretends to be looking for something on the shelf. "Can I help you?" asks Mr. Ludwig. The young man says nothing. He doesn't want them to know he is a foreigner.

Whenever Averbuch does endeavor to speak, Hemon makes sure his dialogue is passive, unattributed. In the entire novel, only two of his phrases are granted quotation marks (the literary equivalent of linguistic emancipation) and one of these - "There you are. I can see you" - is spoken to an empty street.

Likewise, when Lazarus' sister Olga talks to a lawyer about funeral arrangements for her brother's body, her Yiddish is denied quotation marks, even though the lawyer's dialogue has them:

I have no reason to trust you or believe you.
"I am representing certain honorable individuals who would like to help you, both out of a sense of racial responsibility and in their own interest. Permit me to assure you that this combination of motives vouchsafes their sincerity."
All I want is to bury my brother.
"That is what everybody wants, without a doubt."

In America, her foreign language is as good as silence.
   
Most telling of all is that Averbuch's lack of English directly brings about his death. Instead of telling the chief of police why he's shown up at his house (a mission that remains ambiguous for much of the book), he simply thrusts a letter into Chief Shippy's hand, causing the lawman to become so suspicious that he shoots the young man. Eight times. It's apparent that if Lazarus had been able to express his objectives more clearly, the catastrophe would have been avoided.

Brik, unlike Lazarus, has completed his 'acquisition of language.' Fluency, he understands, is more valid than any passport. At times, he reveals a setting so familiar that it's hard to imagine he's actually an immigrant. "In America - that somber land," he says, "I waste my vote, pay taxes grudgingly, share my life with a native wife, and try hard not to wish painful death to the idiot president." (It's amazing that Hemon can write while simultaneously holding a slice of apple pie in his right hand and a hot dog in his left.)

Still, because Brik's story is Lazarus' story, the narration becomes an act of resurrection. The more time Brik spends imagining Averbuch's past, the realer Averbuch becomes; and the more time Brik spends exploring his own roots, the more he finds himself linked to Lazarus. So while America has absorbed the author and protagonist, it's the fiction that's absorbed history. In The Lazarus Project, the art has consumed the real, but in Hemon's hands, it's all very much alive.