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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary and compelling, June 29, 2004
By A Customer
Conspirators might have been written by a 21st century Dostoevsky, especially in its portrayal of the frantic Asher Blumenthal. This remarkable novel skilfully presents the genesis of terrorist activity in Galicia as it moves from 1925 back to 1912-13. With a wealth of finely crafted historical detail, it vividly recreates the conflicts and passions of this era. This is a novel that will be relished by connoisseurs of great works of fiction.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Fiction, March 9, 2006
Really good books reward close reading, and committed readers who crave superb contemporary fiction will find much to nourish them in the unfortunately neglected Conspirators. Those that invest their time and readerly gusto into the novel will discover an utterly absorbing vision. If the book is challenging at times, its composition is so strong and confident that we can rest assured that any difficulties are deliberate; Bernstein wants to make us question the how we make sense of history and of ourselves. We learn from the novel's Overture that before the onslaught of W.W.I there occurred an assassination in Galicia, a frontier town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Evident foreshadowing seems to occur in that we deduce who is very likely responsible - but not all conspiracies end the way we think they will, and human acts themselves are finally not reducible to mere cause and effect. When by the most circumstantial chain of events things turn out so differently, all of a sudden history's retrospective inevitability is severely shaken, for the past is felt to be something endlessly complex, every instant being an infinite divergence of possibilities. In Conspirators there is always a sense of how easy it could all be otherwise - a sense of possibility emerging out of the rich openness of life, and also out of the variousness inherent in human consciousness. Bernstein's characters are unusually lifelike; a result, I think, of their amazingly human capacity for cognition. They seem to think for themselves, rather than in the service of a novelistic plot. Instead of focusing on the life-story of a single protagonist there are several main characters, all irreducibly part of an historical era. It is through the subtle juxtapositioning of a diverse array of characters that the inhabitants of Galicia are related to us, with the result that their individuality is revealed along with their surprising similarities. Their minds are never quite graspable by each other, and when they miscalculate the motives or complexities of others they give away much more about their own. Bernstein's prose is at once intellectual and mystic, precise and erotic. These adjectives also accurately describe Brugger, a mysterious wonder rabbi who has seduced legions of followers with his prophetic exuberance. With this extraordinary character is the allure of absolute self-change - a breaking with the past that is the creation of a new self. His purpose is nothing less than the making of an inward will into an outer world. Antithetical to Brugger is the cynical Count Wiladowski, who achieves a striking pathos in his anxiety over the irrepressible change always occuring in himself, irrespective of his own will. He yearns to find a continuity of self, a harmony with his personal past, so that he can still have some faith in the integrity of his present thoughts and desires. Questions of how we relate to ourselves and to the surrounding world are at the heart of Conspirators. In a subtle scene at the end of the novel, a peripheral but very important character, Batya, struggles to assess the impact of the obscure killings in Galicia, which so effected the course of her own life, along with the mass bloodshed of W.W.I.. Reflecting on a universal horror together with what is close and painful specifically to herself , she is gripped by a feeling of incommensurability as her moral and intellectual premises try to come to terms with the inheritance of the external world. She cannot allow herself to think of the assassinations only in terms of leading up to the Great War, because this would reduce them, assign them a secondary meaning only in relation to the first principle of the war. Similarly, by the end of Conspirators the reader is not permitted to think of the novel's "climax", the assassinations, as the inevitable outcome of the story, and the point up to which everything has been building; for this would reduce the haphazardness and particularity of the individual moments of the book which Bernstein emphasizes have a significance all their own, and could have brought about quite other things.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Starts slowly, but builds to an exciting climax., December 27, 2005
"Conspirators" is a difficult, but ultimately satisfying historical novel. It starts slowly, but builds to a rousing climax. Maybe not a great book, and certainly not for everyone. But if you are interested in the period in which the events described take place, which is the Hapsburg Austria-Hungary empire on the eve of World War I and don't mind struggling through the first 1/2 half of the novel while it gains momentum, you will be rewarded. Of particular interest is the perspective Bernstein offers on the "Jewish Problem" that exists in the wake of the Hapsburg dynasty's halfway enlightened attempts to integrate its native Jewish subjects into the population at large. A word of caution. I did find Bernstein's writing style to be quite annoying initially and unnecessarily difficult. He rarely writes a simple sentence. Instead, he prefers a sentence that starts off chasing a thought in one direction, then swerves abruptly to head off in the opposite direction. This is an OK thing to do once in a while, but not every sentence! The style is intended to suggest the ambiguity that clouds the complex motivations of the overly-sophisticated principal actors in the drama. Unfortunately, the conceit is greatly overdone, which may account for some of the more negative reviews. The plot of the novel -- and the novel is heavily plotted -- revolves around a conspiracy organized by Hans, the dilettante son of an extremely wealthy Jewish entrepreneur. In the book's discussion of the revolutionary milieu coursing through Eastern Europe, there are parallels to Dostoevsky's "The Devils." Bernstein writes about the class conflict in Austrian society from both sides. He deftly mixes philosophical elements from a Romantic belief in radical socialism among the bored elite to the very real tension between the upper and lower classes into the revolutionary stew that Hans stirs. When Hans injures himself seriously when explosives he is playing with accidentally ignite, it luckily serves to remove him from the scene & save him from further harm. Somewhat inexplicably, the remaining conspirators - ironically, all sons of prominent aristocratic (and Gentile) families - decide to carry on with Hans's plan without him, with tragic results for almost all the main characters. In a final note of irony, the entire desultory incident becomes a mere footnote to the larger tragedy of the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire's Old Order during WWI. There is also an interesting sub-plot involving a charismatic Jewish rabbi who has a Messiah thing going on among some displaced lower and middle class Jews. Bernstein also takes note of the rising Zionist movement among the Jewish population and alludes on several occasions to the growing acceptance of Freudian psychoanalysis occurring back at the Empire's capital. It is a tribute to the author's skill that none of these philosophical asides that spice up this novel of ideas quite nicely seem forced. In fact, the large cast of characters are all well-rounded and finely drawn. This is a considerable achievement. The 2nd half of the novel features several episodes involving the wealthy Count Wiladowski, the governor of the province, that provide considerable comic relief. By then, I had either become accustomed to Bernstein's halting sentences or the author had moderated his earlier stylistic flourishes. At any rate, the Count is quite a character and his antics had me chuckling during several sparkling set pieces. The long coda at the end of the book is a bit of a letdown, but it does serve to tie up the loose ends of the narrative neatly. The larger significance of the fictional events described in the book is in the way they shed light on some of the watershed events of the early 20th century; from the royal assassination by Serbian revolutionaries that leads to WWI, to the Bolshevik takeover in Russia to the rise of Hitler in neighboring Germany. The sweep of the book is impressive. If you can abide an historical novel with some intellectual heft, you should find this book thought-provoking and, ultimately, very enjoyable.
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