Lazarus Is Dead

by Richard Beard

Overview

This story of Jesus’s childhood best friend is “a thrilling meta-novel” and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of the Year (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette).

Like most successful men in their early thirties, Lazarus has plans that don’t involve dying. He is busy organizing his sisters, his business, and his women. Life is mostly good until far away in Galilee, without warning, his childhood best friend, Jesus, turns water into wine. Immediately, Lazarus falls ill. And with each subsequent miracle his health deteriorates: a nasty cough develops into an alarming array of afflictions unresponsive to the usual remedies.
His sisters think Jesus can help, but the two men haven’t spoken for years. Lazarus is willing to try anything to make himself well, anything, that is, except ask Jesus for help. Lazarus dies. Jesus weeps. Lazarus rises. This part we all know. But Lazarus is about to discover that returning from the dead isn’t easy at all . . .
An ingeniously funny and moving novel disguised as biography, Lazarus Is Dead recounts the story of a great friendship lost and regained that unabashedly turns convention on its head. Richard Beard draws on biblical sources, historical detail, art, and contemporary literature to cast a spell that remains unbroken until the final pages of this story about second chances.

“Beard’s take on Lazarus is nothing less than astonishing—and he respects the reader by taking religion and religious questions seriously.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Thoroughly entertaining . . . a brilliant, genre-bending retelling and subversion of one of the oldest, most sensational stories in the western canon.”—Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

“Clever and original . . . keeps the reader guessing until the death—and beyond.”—The Financial Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609450809
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/25/2012
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Richard Beard is the author of four novels, including The Cartoonist (Bloomsbury, 2000), and Dry Bones (Secker & Warburg, 2004). This is his first US publication. He is also the author of three works of non-fiction and the Director of the National Academy of Writing in London.

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating mixture of fiction and academic essay...using biblical sources and other, less orthodox ones, Beard weaves a compelling tale portrait of first-century Israel, of Jerusalem with its factions and sects, and of Jesus, Lazarus's enigmatic friend, as he makes his journey towards the Cross

Catholic Herald

Praise for Lazarus Is Dead

"Richard Beard is one of the most ingenious, resourceful and entertaining novelists in England."
—Philip Hensher

"Lazarus Is Dead is a thrilling meta-novel. Richard Beard informs, provokes and always entertains."
—Maria Smple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette

"A thoroughly entertaining elaboration of Lazarus's miraculous life. Lazarus Is Dead is no ordinary novel: it is a brilliant, genre bending retelling and subversion of one of the oldest, most sensational stories in the western canon."
—Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

"This clever and original book keeps the reader guessing until the death—and beyond."
—The Financial Times

"Beard can stir emotion quickly and simply... His essayistic digressions temper the mythic luminosity of his subject, contributing to the poignance of his imagined 'biography'."
—Laurence Scott, The Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

In this alternative theological novel Jesus does more than weep...and Lazarus does more than die. Beard engages in much plausible speculation here, for example, that Jesus and Lazarus grew up as best friends and then drifted apart. Lazarus seized an opportunity to become a businessman, buying sheep from the local farmers and reselling them at a profit to the temple, for according to strict Jewish practice, many sheep had to be sacrificed. But just about the time his former childhood friend performed his first miracle, Lazarus began to come down with a strange and mysterious illness, one that is more than merely an inconvenience that gets in the way of his sexual relationship with the prostitute Lydia and his engagement to Saloma. Beard invests this illness with a mythic quality by having Lazarus contract all of the seven major diseases of ancient Israel, and his symptoms combine those of smallpox, tuberculosis and dysentery, for his death has to be as certain as his resurrection. At first he calls upon Yanav the Healer, a local dispenser of herbs, but it soon becomes clear that Lazarus' physical decline is too severe for Yanav to handle. Lazarus' sister, Mary, then pleads with him to call upon Jesus, whose reputation for performing miracles is growing, but Lazarus is adamant that his former friend not be summoned. The mythic power of the story remains constant, of course, so Lazarus does in fact die, and Jesus does resurrect him, but the Romans, especially in the vicious form of Cassius, immediately begin to persecute Lazarus, feeling his resurrection has reinforced the extraordinary political power of Jesus. Throughout the narrative, Beard schools the reader in literary and artistic treatments of Lazarus to give the story a cultural and intellectual framework. Beard's take on Lazarus is nothing less than astonishing--and he respects the reader by taking religion and religious questions seriously.

Kirkus Reviews