The genre inaugurated by Jonathan Safran Foer's 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated has finally found its standard bearer. Like Everything before it, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project comprises a mildly successful, yet deeply neurotic author living in America, a character who speaks in a funny patois, an intriguing story of a murdered Eastern European Jew, the author/narrator's journey back to Europe to write a book about the aforementioned Eastern European Jew, existential concern about writing said book, and the crafting of this concern into the very book that the reader is holding. Despite this seemingly formulaic template, however, there are a few worthwhile differences.

The Bosnian-born Hemon came to the English language late in life, and, as a result, he brings a playfulness to his writing that is often absent among that of native speakers (including Foer). Hemon is plainly and ardently in love with the music of English consonants and vowels — take, for instance, the cadence of his "wistful whistle of a teapot" and "sparkling cuff links rhymed with the rings on his wife's arthritic talons," or the idea that uneven street lights can be "arrhythmic."

In terms of narrative tempo, the hero's spiraling journey — which starts in early-20th-century Chicago, fast-forwards to the present day, then wends back to war-torn Sarajevo and time-ravaged Moldova villages — is much less madcap than Foer's seemingly frantic race across Ukraine. Though suffused with melancholy and nostalgia (the genre's recognizable emotional dimples), Hemon's work has more in common with Daniel Mendelsohn's ponderous Shoah-memoir The Lost. That's not to say it's a meditation in stillness — there's still blood, guts, glory, puns, and the precious. And in Hemon's hands, any residual gimmickry left over from his antecedents is overcome through sheer and furious talent.

-Josh Stein