Pg. 53-96 The Lazarus Project

The Lazarus Project by, Aleksandar Hermon, is about a young man who emigrated from Bosnia.  He is married to a woman named Mary, and is trying to become a writer in the United States.  Throughout the second section of reading we see how the main character, Brik, travels to Ukraine with his friend Rora.  Rora and Brik knew each other back in Sarajevo before the war.  Brik was able to escape the war by taking classes, but Rora was caught right up in it.  We see how Rora got involved in the fighting because he trusted his friend Rambo.  Rambo was able to get an upper hand during the war through his relationship with a man named Miller.  Miller was a very wealthy American who loved poker, and Rambo beat him miserably in a game.  This particular story is described by Rora, who says, “Miller lost, of course, and Rambo had him in his pocket” (84 Hermon).  This could be the reason why Rora is ultimately alive to tell this tale.  He was able to escape the war and meet back up with Brik and go on to be a photographer.  

The other part of this section is the story of Lazarus and how a policeman killed him.  We meet his sister who is overcome with grief and sorrow to find out that her brother is dead.  This part of the novel confused me because I wasn’t sure who was directly related to Lazarus, and who the real Lazarus was.  Brik tells a story to Rora about a biblical Lazarus, he says, “ ...Lazarus is dead and his sister is friends with a certain Jesus Christ… so she asks him to do something about it…He calls him forth and Lazarus rises from his death…” (76 Hermon).  Due to the fact that there is this biblical tale about Lazarus and a real Lazarus in the story I was confused upon which they were talking about and who the sisters where related to.  In the end, I believe that Olga and Isador are both related to the Lazarus that has been recently killed.

Definitions:

Pomaded – a scented ointment, especially one used for the scalp or for dressing the hair

Cothurni – a grave and elevated style of acting; tragic acting; tragedy

Promulgated – to make known by open declaration; publish

Parsing – to analyze (a sentence) in terms of grammatical constitutes, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations