Mirror Images

I read The Lazarus Project straight through to the end yesterday afternoon in the quietest room of a quiet house. The book has a surreal invincibility about it—you don't argue with its premise; you don't quibble with its construction; you surrender, and you surrender willingly. There's an implied hysteria in the tone—a desperation that goes comedic, even slapstick in places. There's the smashing about of a marriage, a ditintegration and then rebirth of the word 'home.'

Two (favorite) books came to mind as I read—Colum McCann's Zoli, in which a contemporary author (a quasi McCann) goes in search of a Gypsy poet of the mid 20th century, and Michael Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter, which brings to life Buddy Bolden, the legendary horn player of New Orleans. All three books are engined forward by authorial quest. All of them yelp with sheer alivedness. The you, the I, the them become, at one point, indistinguishable.

Oh, to write a book like that. To be here, where I am—nearly a dozen books in and still a novice.

Read more...

Sitting, Reading, Falling through Hemon's Rabbit Hole

Into the final pages of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project now, a rabbit hole of a book, W.G. Sebald reminscent. In which a contemporary writer goes searching for his subject (Lazarus Averbuch, a suspected anarchist shot down in March 1908, in the home of Chicago's chief of police). In which real life (but isn't this fiction?) collides with the imagined (but wasn't the suspected anarchist an historical artifact, his dead body photographed, the photograph here, in the pages of this book?). Hemon is a giant, a tease. He doesn't like the word novel, he has said. He observes the world astutely but refuses to take notes, or when he does, he can't decode them. He escapes classification. On purpose.

In any case, I have been sitting here, reading. I have glanced up now and then to get my bearings, watching the sun change shape on the door that divides my office from my home—the sun fisting through but bouncing back, turning around on itself. The camera, I realized, was nearby. I reached for it and took three photos. I returned to Hemon and then there was this—an exchange between Hemon's contemporary narrator (who is in Eastern Europe researching his Lazarus project) and his traveling companion, the photographer named Rora (who is not, we take it, to be confused with the actual traveling photographer who journeyed with Hemon to Eastern Europe as he researched this book).

In any case, this exchange was a startle in this, my mobius-strip afternoon:

Why did you take that picture?

That's a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.

Why do you take pictures?

I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.

It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.

So what?

So nothing, I shrugged.

They can look at the picture and remind themselves.

But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?

I see the picture, Rora said. What's with these questions?

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Read more...

Wind Howls

I could not sleep, for the wind was howling through the iced trees and a conversation banged around in my head. I roamed the five downstairs rooms of the house, staring through windows, watching the darkness, the ice glints, the blank faces of neighbors' living rooms. Tired, still, awake, always, I took Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project from the pile of unread books and began, discovering this:

The ice-sheathed trees twinkle in the morning drabness; a branch broken under the weight of ice touches the pavement, rattling its frozen tips. Someone peeks from behind a curtain of the house across the street, the face ashen against the dark space behind it. It is a young woman: he smiles at her and she quickly draws the curtain. All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all the world is.

Read more...