MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Aleksandar Hemon (de quien Anagrama publicó la extraordinaria La cuestión de Bruno) ha publicado en mayo de este año una nueva novela, The Lazarus Project, a la que desde ya se considera su obra más ambiciosa. Se trata de una novela de correspondencias, que une dos historias. En una, se describe el asesinato en 1908 de un inmigrante judío en Chicago y en la otra, la historia contemporánea de Vladimir Brik (escritor bosnio americano) que viaja a Europa del Este para descubrir el misterio tras esa muerte. Un fotógrafo, compañero de viaje de Brik, es quien reconstruye ambas historias a través de las fotografías que tomó en Bosnia. En la página web de la novela, uno puede seguir de manera virtual (con fotografías auténticas de Velibor Bozovic) esta reconstrucción. David Leavitt ha escrito para The Washington Post:

The structure of The Lazarus Project is ingenious. Alternating chapters give us the story of Lazarus's killing (the story Brik is writing) and the story of Brik's own journey in search of Lazarus. Then, as the novel progresses, these narratives begin, eerily, to merge. Characters from Brik's life -- or versions of them -- show up in Lazarus's story. Even Brik himself makes a brief appearance. It's a conceit that Hemon justifies through a series of meditations on the idea of resurrection that Lazarus, by his very name, evokes. Art is resurrection, but so is history, a point that Hemon drives home when he notes (ruefully) the 1908 newspaper editorials bemoaning "the weak laws that allowed the foreign anarchist pestilence to breed parasitically on the American body politic. The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror -- funny how old habits never die." (...) Whether describing turn-of-the-century Chicago, with its mean tenements and decrepit outhouses, or the "onionesque armpits" of a Moldovan pimp or an "unreal McDonald's" in Moldova, "shiny and sovereign and structurally optimistic," Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: The novel is full of jokes and linguistic riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov. And though the prose occasionally lapses into turgidity ("Olga's stomach is churning and she would vomit if there were anything in it to disgorge"), these overwrought moments are more than made up for by the many gorgeous ones. (In the aftermath of the pogrom: "The down from torn pillows floating, like souls, through the fog of what had just happened.") For beauty and violence, in Hemon's universe, are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, he seems determined not to let his readers (particularly his American readers) escape the experience of war as a personal affront and a personal transformation.

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This entry was posted on 7.02.2008 at 12:49 p. m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.