Customer Reviews

Conspirators: A Novel

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

Vienna, 1925. In a newsstand the photo of a dangerous Soviet Ceka secret agent reported to be visiting Berlin with a Russian Delegation. A successful middle aged Jewish writer who believe to recognize in that image a former acquaintance of the times before the war.
A sour impression that his life has been acted by someone else (this man?) and the attempt to cast light in a series of crimes happened just before the declaration of war.

It is on the wings of these impressions we are invited in one of the most accomplished novels of these last years.
A novel in the most classical and talented meaning of the word: an excellent piece of work, in a style remembering of Tolstoy and Joseph Roth, James and Zola, with a perfect blend of realism and surrealism.

The Count Governor of a remote provincial city on the remotest edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ("on the edge of the unending Asian steppes"), a Jewish intellectual chief of his secret police, a dying Jewish multimillionaire and his rebel son, the young cadets of the landed aristocracy, a Jewish rabbi and his murderous community, the obscure all-pervading presence of anti-Semitism, a series of murders, a revolutionary plot, a bloodbath.

This is a book I read with blissful pleasure, because of its ability to recreate a world, give substance to a imaginary geography, paint attitudes and character - but also for the subtle pervasive warping effect of memory, a light surreal mirror that blend of Kafka, Buzzati, Roth and sometimes freezes in the sharp gray-black images of Grosz, sometimes searches oblivion in the morbid light of an ancient black and with daguerreotype,

The true pleasure of the book doesn't come from the force of the story and the descriptive ability of the writer, but by the contemplation of the human destiny, an all-pervading sadness but also a metaphysical pessimism in the possibility of human action. The Count governor obsessed by self preservation, the chief of the secret police by the meaning of Evil and Good, the Jewish rabbi fascinated by murder as confrontation with God, the young revolutionaries looking for an act of total auto-affirmation (revolutionary justice like they call it), the multimillionaire seemingly the only one to be master of his destiny, but the destiny of a dying man despairing of his only son.

I cannot but warmly recommend this novel, with a single warning: this is not an easy book. Its main virtues rest on description and the blend of old European intellectualism, sometimes to detriment of action: so if you look for a easy to read spy or crime story, this is not the book for you.

You are truly welcome if you can suggest other readings or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.

This was a wonderful book -- interesting subject matter; distinctive, thoughtful style; psychological and human at the same time. I bought it after reading a NY Times mildly favorable review, attracted by the unplowed subject matter -- revolutionary callow youth and the Jewish community at the eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian empire on the verge of WWI. The subject matter was indeed interesting, but the quality of the novel was much greater than the review's restraint. The convoluted, intellectual prose made getting into the book slow, but brought a great payoff of depth and authenticity. Most of all, it has a gravitas I've been missing in contemporary fiction, which lurches from one lurid situation to another, substituting sensation for insight. The customer reviews on Amazon.com thoroughly reinforced my view -- about one third liked the book, the rest excoriated it for being slow, boring, no action, and violating the cardinal rule of writing, which supposedly is "Show, don't tell". Hooray for the violation! Who made that rule -- Ernest Hemingway?

Michael Andre Bernstein's "Conspirators" is a long-winded read about the dark happenings in a frontier town of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in 1913. The corrupt and assassination-fearing Count-Governor Wildawowski appoints the brilliant, exiled Rabbanical student Tausk to be his security chief. Tausk matches his wits against various would be conspirators including Brugger, a mysterious Jewish preacher, and Hans Rotenburg heir to a vast fortune and aspiring socialist. While Bernstein does a remarkable job in describing each character's innermost thoughts and feelings, he does so at expense of the plot, which moves along achingly slow. And with almost no dialogue between characters the book stutters under the weight of the characters' thoughts. Dramatic events are reduced to one paragraph while late-night musings of sleepless characters go on for pages.

However, there is some great writing in this book, particularly in capturing the setting and mood of a world right on the brink of momentual change before WWI. But this lengthy read is only recommended for those who are keenly interested in this era or who enjoy characterization at its finest.

I found this story about the beginning of the end of the Hapsburg Empire to be a carefully written psychological novel full of insights into the human condition, as well as a fascinating collection of character portraits of various extremely interesting personalities.

The subtlety and precision with which Mr. Bernstein unveils his tale are impressive and highly appreciated by someone who reads widely and often. This is a novel that must have taken a long period of time to write.

Imagine the difficulty of writing every word of dialogue between an extremely intelligent, charismatic rabbi and an equally intelligent, and shrewd Jewish millionaire, which lasts for ten pages or more. To be convincing, the writer must create lines for us that only someone who is charismatic could generally think of saying, and words also that only a brilliant businessman might utter, and do so in a way that both entertains and informs, and which meaningfully furthers the plot.

All that and more Mr. Bernstein manages to accomplish both with those two characters, as well as many other equally well-drawn characters who populate the entirety of this book. Also, I stayed very interested in all of these people despite the fact that few of them are entirely likable.

That is a testament to Mr. Bernstein's great writing ability, as well as to the fact that these people are all struggling in some way, wrestling with demons that they can't always control--but still trying nonetheless, still valiantly attempting to overcome the ghosts that haunt them.

But isn't this part of the essence of being human? Isn't this what each of us goes through at some point or points in our lives? Aren't we all struggling to be happy, to be successful, to figure this whole life thing out?

Perhaps then, this book is just as much about the reader as it is those who are written about, which may be why it is such a fascinating tale.

With that said, my only complaint, which echoes others, is that the plot moved too slowly. These wonderfully drawn characters should have been allowed to do more, and to be more. Mr. Bernstein has built a gorgeous red Ferrari with his bare hands, from the ground up, but doesn't drive it past 55 mph. The fact that he doesn't get it out of second or third gear is a shame, because Wow, what a beauty it is!

Nonetheless, this novel has enough beauty and humanity and hope and struggle (and redemption?) in it to make it a very entertaining and richly rewarding story worthy of your time and patience.

A detail oriented look at the class wars in a crumbling 1912-1913 European empire. Each sentence is finely crafted and characters are fully fleshed but neither, or both, good or bad, the cause and effect of life decisions made for themselves or to the detriment of others. Manipulative. A good read on a dark evening with tea for a portrait of Jewish relations pre-WWII.

A friend of a friend wrote this novel, which otherwise I probably would never have come across. I picked it up with no knowledge of what it was about and was amazed by how good it was. Not knowing anything about Galicia in the early 20th c., I can't say whether the book is historically accurate, but I can say that I was quickly sucked into the story. Essentially, the novel is about a bunch of human time bombs skulking erratically about this small city, and the reader waits with mounting anxiety to discover which of them goes off first and worst. What I most liked, though, were the characters, who seemed drawn for the most part with a shrewd, sardonic, and knowledgable eye. Some of the reviewers here apparently didn't like the way the author tunneled deep into these people, but I got a real kick out of it. This is the author's first novel; I hope he writes another.

This is an ambitious historical novel set in Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the eve of WWI. Bernstein attempts a combined social and psychological novel. Some reviewers refer to this as a 'modernist' work but its scope and intent seem closer to major 19th century novels. Conspirators features a host of characters and efforts to provide psychological description of all the major characters. Major themes are the fragmentation of life in this setting and a sense of alienation that grips all the characters, though in different ways. As commented by others, the focus of the novel is on Jewish life, and only one of the major characters is not a Jew.
The quality of writing is distinctly uneven. Many characters and scenes are delineated well. Others are repetitive and can be dull reading. The scenes, for example, involving the 'wonder rebbe' Moses Elch, are consistently interesting. Other scenes, like those involving the major non-Jewish character, Count Wiladowski, are repetitive. Overall, the effort to treat Jewish life in this community is sympathetic and interesting. In terms of the themes of fragmentation and alienation, I am not sure the book really hangs together, though this may be Bernstein's deliberate choice.
Despite these defects, there aren't a lot of recent novels with this serious intent and ambition. Bernstein may be a writer to watch.