The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

I was equally struck by this beautiful novel's simultaneously incredible humor and incredible sadness. A perfect example of their seamless coexistence in these pages is when our narrator, Vladimir Brik, walks into his Chicago kitchen to make coffee before his wife, Mary, awakes:

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

Brik's marriage is in trouble because of his struggles to find his place, his identity, both as Bosnian immigrant in America and a writer. So the mundane, domestic details of his home kitchen are coated in sadness, but also by a sense of absurdity, of things being out of place.

The humor also comes from the exaggeration inherent in Brik's tradition of storytelling. Brik explains that this is how stories are told in his country: they are exaggerated, stripped of all proportion and divorced from truth until the world they create is absurd. Brik is shocked when, at a dinner party early in their marriage, Mary questions the validity of one of his stories in front of strangers. This is breaking a code; he never tells a story in front of her again.

As Brik struggles to tell his own story -- to blend the Bosnian and American modes of narration -- he seeks to tell the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a mysterious historical figure who was shot and killed after attacking the Chicago chief of police in 1908, an incident that caused a xenophobic reaction among Chicagoans that all Jews were violent anarchists. Averbuch's corpse is stolen, recalling his namesake, the Lazarus who was resurrected by Jesus. All the character's in this novel are exiles, including the biblical Lazarus, whom Brik considers exiled from death. Did he die eventually? Was he ever able to go home? Brik wonders.

Hemon's novel shows the author as a master craftsman, truly worthy of his 2004 MacArthur "genius grant." He's able to subtly interweave questions about religion, xenophobia, family, and partnership in such a way that none of it seems trite or heavy-handed, but so that it all fits together seamlessly. The humor and the pain are so carefully blended that they never clash but rather serve as each other's perfect complements. Though Brik may have trouble telling his own story, Hemon has obviously found his voice.