The Project of the New Narrative of Aleksandar Hemon’s the "Lazarus Project"

Abstract

The Lazarus Project (2008) is a novel by Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-American writer with immigrant experience. In the light of transcultural experiences, Hemon’s novel opens new perspectives and validates expression of cultural knowledge and differences, which can be done only with a deep knowledge of two cultures: in his case Bosnia and America.

Metaphorically speaking, the novel’s project is incomplete. It is a demonstration of the non-acceptance of the completed story. Also, Hemon’s novel is a project of “disremembering”. It means the text is a project of recognition one’s own experience under the new narrative. “Disremembering”, in Hemon’s book, is a kind of resurrection, and it has a special meaning for the people who have come through a form of actual, physical slaughter.

In The Lazarus Project, Hemon intertwines a double narrative of the multilayered parallel universes of the past and the present by following the narrator Vladimir Brik as he questions his life. Brik traces the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant-and, at the same time, questions his outer reality. In the first person narrative, Brik explains that he needs to re-imagine what he could not retrieve, and to see what he could not imagine. For this reason, he “disremembers” his own experience within the story of Lazarus that, actually, implies its remembrance. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the project of disremembering in Hemon’s The Lazarus Project.