Aleksander Hemon often gets compared to Nabokov and Conrad, because he's a gifted prose stylist for whom English is a second language. He seems to derive great pleasure from the wide range of adjectives and descriptive verbs available to him; it gives his descriptions of people and places a wonderful specificity and richness.
However, neither the narrative nor the themes of The Lazarus Project have the same depth as the prose. The book interleaves the (true) story of a Ukrainian immigrant in 1908 Chicago who was shot by police as a suspected anarchist with the (fictional) story of a Bosnian immigrant in 2008 Chicago who wants to write about the earlier immigrant. The idea is to say something about the immigrant experience and about the United States' attitudes toward immigrants. I found the story somewhat clichéd and the ideas not too insightful.
However, neither the narrative nor the themes of The Lazarus Project have the same depth as the prose. The book interleaves the (true) story of a Ukrainian immigrant in 1908 Chicago who was shot by police as a suspected anarchist with the (fictional) story of a Bosnian immigrant in 2008 Chicago who wants to write about the earlier immigrant. The idea is to say something about the immigrant experience and about the United States' attitudes toward immigrants. I found the story somewhat clichéd and the ideas not too insightful.
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