(Picador, £14.99)
"I am a reasonably loyal citizen of a couple of countries," Vladimir Brik tells us by way of introduction. "In America—that sombre land—I waste my vote, pay my taxes grudgingly, share my life with a native wife, and try hard not to wish painful death to the idiot president. But I also have a Bosnian passport I seldom use…"
Brik has been living in the US since war broke out in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and is now in a phase best described as "moral waddling": thickening on cheeseburgers in suburban Chicago, he relies on his neurosurgeon wife for money while making noises about writing a book that is yet to materialise. The book will be based on a tale dredged from surviving historical archives about a 19-year-old Jewish Ukrainian immigrant called Lazarus Averbuch, who was shot dead at the home of the Chicago police chief in 1908. But Brik seems in no danger of making any progress on the novel until, almost by accident, he wins a research grant, enabling him and Rora, a childhood friend from Sarajevo, to embark on a journey around eastern Europe, retracing Lazarus's short life.
Hemon's narrative oscillates between Brik and Rora—tangling with pimps, prostitutes and casino heavies in modern-day Ukraine, Moldova and Bosnia—and the story of Lazarus, Brik's subject. An unhappy prototype for Brik himself, Lazarus survived the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and escaped to America to join his sister before his life was cut short in Chicago by the trigger-happy Chief Shippy. Death, however, was not the end of his story, which was then framed as evidence of an anarchist conspiracy, creating a hyperbolised climate of fear which parallels several periods of American history, from the witchcraft hysteria of Puritan New England to today's war on terror. As Lazarus's grief-stricken sister is told: "Freedom is a business much easier to run if the authorities have an enemy, the more categorical the better."
At first, Hemon confines the tales of Lazarus and Brik to alternating chapters, but as Brik's mind is beset by "ontological warps," Lazarus's story gradually becomes part of his own. Add to this Rora's propensity to tell tall tales about his escapades in besieged Sarajevo in the 1990s, and soon the narrative has become a temporal tapestry, interwoven with echoes. American journalists called Miller feature in two tales. In each, their reporting is distorted by the special interests to which they are beholden—in one case, the Chicago police department; in the other, a psychotic Bosnian warlord called Rambo. History, Hemon is telling us, is not something we can seal up in a box or a book: most of its unpleasant truths are still with us. As Brik falls asleep, violent memories rise "like a corpse released from the bottom of the lake."
Sometimes aping the tight, breathless style of Miller's reporting for the 1908 Chicago Tribune, at other times meandering through Brik's vivid dream landscape, Hemon's use of language is deft—and all the more impressive because, like Nabokov and Conrad before him, Hemon learnt English relatively late in life. (Like Brik, he arrived in the US shortly before the siege of Sarajevo began.) He is among a new generation of American writers that have produced a glut of tales about adventuresome mishaps in eastern Europe, most notably Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated, and Gary Shteyngart in Absurdistan. But whereas Shteyngart's characters are ebullient and anarchic, and his comedy derives from his tone of mock-seriousness, Hemon does quite the opposite. On the surface there is farce. Underneath lie horror and tragedy, and characters—like Lazarus's sister, Olga—haunted by grief and loss.
Brik's memories of Sarajevo before the war are laden with nostalgia: it was a place where "everyone could be what they claimed they were." But for him, just as for so many other refugees, the idyll he yearns to return to is a chimera. He has superficially assimilated himself in America, but still feels outside of it; he is distanced from his wife (who operates from "her high position of surgically American decency") and is yet to find his own agency as a writer. For him, Bosnia becomes everything America is not. In the US, "the incessant perpetration of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth," but the home country he imagines is a place where "disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth… just the pleasure of being in the story and, maybe, passing it off as their own."
In the end, Brik can only unlock his writer's block once he accepts that all he has are fragments—of Lazarus's story, Rora's and even his own. Then, in possibilities and queries, Lazarus is resurrected from the footnotes of history. "Had Lazarus lived, would he have become Billy Averbuch? Would his children have become Avery or Averiman or, who knows, Field?… Would his anarchist proclivities, receding chin, and simian ears have been tucked deep inside the family history, inside the glorious American dream?" These are questions that frame an unfinished yet vital story. As Hemon knows, the most captivating tales are fashioned by pulling history apart at its seams.
