The Book of Lazarus

Mr. Grossman's last novel should change our reading habits: despite its - at firts glance - strange and complex structure, it is a story about how we deny the right to the past to be more than a parallax effect. It engraves our so-called linearity in an ever-changing form, in order to open our eyes: the world is made of voices, and each voice creates its own world. To enter these worlds, one has to be stripped naked of all conventions. This is a great novel, for all those who read Vollmann, Danielewski, D. Cooper.

I bought this book when it was first published and never got around to reading it. After I read it, I was amazed and shocked by the intelligence it took to put this piece of art together. Thinking about it now, I am still in shock that someone could put something together so smart and so ingenious. Buy this book and stick with it!

It's really great! It's really smart and compelling! It just make me want to lend it to all of my friends!!

This is an example of cynical publishing tactics, in which a desperate pseudo-author is conditioned to think that his so-called real-life experiences are actually the subliminal text of the masses. In a heroic undervaluing of his emotions, the author, aided by skewered layout and typeface arrangements, manages to make a mess that suggests that everyone (desperate readers) could be a phoney-baloney post-modern author if they just collect their spit, and print. Please read late Latin authors. Language can be degraded, for it is more powerful than your expressions permit.

Grossman's The Book of Lazarus follows a subverted pattern of character surround, in which Grossman forces the reader into a superb spectral analysis of how each character will eventually fall prey to the sinister underworld connections of Mitchell O'Banion. O'Banion's daughter, a compelling character who leads the reader through a maze of political and intelligence countermands, becomes one of the last connected characters to perish. But her legacy and the path to get there create a unique and fresh contemporary novel, whose photographic reminisces to the dead (the actual book of Lazarus)fit well into the novel's scenic and dark forms. If not for a somewhat unrelated and stupendously unending political ramble at the end, this novel would own an integrity one rarely finds in contemporary novels.