Vladimir Brik, the hero of Aleksandar Hemon's third book, The Lazarus Project, had an elderly uncle called Mikhal back in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who liked to be shown family photograph albums and to get his young nephew to point out who everyone was: 'And here is Aunt Olga, smiling . . . And that's you . . . And there is me.' 'Nobody ever found it strange' that Uncle Mikhal was stone-blind. It occurred to the boy one day that the pictures could be blank, or pictures of anything. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he could tell Uncle Mikhal whatever he liked about the world beyond. So he rearranged events in history here and there, sinking a new ship at the Battle of Guadalcanal; he altered science, inventing a new subatomic particle, the pronek; he dreamed up a continent. This went on for years.

LRB 23 October 2008 | PDF Download