2008 book 81

Aleksander Hemon's The Lazarus Project
Apparently Hemon wrote this afer receiving one of those MacArthur genius grants. I think some elements must be autobiographical--it's about a Bosnian writer living in Chicago who is researching a book about a young Jewish man (the titular Lazarus Averbuch) who was murdered by Chicago's chief of police in 1908 (this is true). I was more interested in the bits about Lazarus than the bits about the writer, who isn't a very likable character, and I almost totally lost interest after a scene where a dog is casually tortured. Just thinking about that one small paragraph makes me sick and dropped this book a few grades. B-.