In his excellent novel The Lazarus Project, Bosnian-born author Aleksandar Hemon combines historical, personal and fictional elements (in multiple narratives) to portray the overarching human experiences of exile, migration, alienation and loneliness.
The narrator feels at time isolated in his marriage to a woman he professes to love deeply; with the gulf created by their very distant cultural worlds and experiences he often finds himself feeling “unseen.” The following are two selections from Hemon’s novel (with my brief introductions).