From the Inside Flap
Adam Resurrected is the crowning achievement of one of Israel's literary masters and remains one of the most powerful works of Holocaust fiction ever written. Adam Stein, a former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths, is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. Alternately more brilliant than the doctors and more insane than any of the patients, Adam struggles wildly to make sense of a world in which the line has been irreversibly blurred between sanity and madness. With the biting irony of Catch-22, the intellectual vigor of Saul Bellow, and the pathos and humanity that are Kaniuk's hallmarks, Adam Resurrected offers a vision of a modern hell that devastates even as it inches toward redemption.
"Yoram Kaniuk is one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World."--The New York Times
"Of the novelists I have discovered in translation...the three for whom I have the greatest admiration are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peter Handke, and Yoram Kaniuk."--Susan Sontag
"A masterpiece of inventiveness, compassion, and stylistic virtuosity."--Jewish Spectator
"Whether it is due to the originality of his broken style, or the sensitivity of his characters--the men and women imprisoned by their angels and demons--or his implacable lucidity, Kaniuk must be considered one of the great writers of our time."--Le Monde
Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930 and took part in Israel's War of Independence in 1948. A painter, journalist, and theater critic, he is best known as a novelist. His books have been translated into twenty languages and have earned him the Bialik Prize, the French Prix de Droits de l'Homme, and the Israeli President's Prize.
Adam Stein is a Jew, a circus clown, a dog, a beloved mental patient in an upscale Israeli institution shortly after WWII. Thats all the listener needs to know. From that point on, Stefan Rudnickis narration seems more like a poem than a novel. Image piles on image as Rudnicki tells the story in a melodic voice, animated or deadpan as the situation requires. Its as if he alone were born to read these words. The original book was written in Hebrew, and its hard to imagine any subtlety lost in translation. Many listeners will not be engaged with this quirky story, but the more literarily inclined wont want to miss a word and more than likely will listen more than once. R.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
