Brik says he is going to write a book about the 1908 death of Lazarus Averbuch, an Jewish immigrant shot to death at the doorstep of the Chicago chief of police.

Brik travels to Sarajevo to research Lazarus' background.

The book meanders. Sometimes it is in first person with Brik's life aimless thoughts, moods, and experiences. Some parts are in 3rd person with Lazarus' story. It is a lot of Brik's feelings and what the mood strikes him to consider. ( )

Fascinating and unique. This story is is haunting ( )

I found this book, #17 on my TBR and my first read of 2016, pretty disjointed. I didn't really care about most of the characters, although I pitied Olga. The book alternated chapters between the fictionalized account of real events, and the travails of the narrator Vladimir Brik and his friend Rora, who half the time wanted Brik to shut up and relax. Brik himself seemed to be a professional beggar, and I agreed with his assertion that few people would care if he was dead. Though it was often hilarious, this book was half history lesson, half travelogue, and somewhat confusing. ( )

My first reaction is that I disliked (heartily) the first-person narrator's slow, slow melancholy. As the book progressed, that melancholy seemed to be the book's purpose - or even to be its own character. His refusal of optimism and just how much of his history is responsible for it are my main takeaways.

The narrative of Olga's crushing anguish interested me much more than the narrator's. ( )

I was racing through this book when I was sidelined by the global pandemic inability to concentrate. I stuck with it, though. Perhaps a bit too bleak for a lockdown read but it's my kind of thing. Person investigates an historic episode (though different, think Laurent Binet's HHhH or Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time) while dealing with their own stuff. Recommend. ( )