Golem Song [Paperback]

Marc Estrin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2006

By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers.

A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking and who believes the world to be completely irrational, should not take one companion for granted, much less two. Women who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions, and his antic clowning all at the same time are not easy to come by.

But when the thought arises in Alan that he’s been “chosen” to deliver Jewish America from the threat of Anti-Semitism, then all his connections to reality fall away, including those to his lovers and his family. Recalling the folktale of the Golem—the Frankensteinian giant of clay that saved the Jews in 16th Century Prague—Alan lays out a plan of attack and then sets to making the most outrageous of preparations in the culture wars, in New York City at the turn of the millennium.

Like each of the acclaimed Estrin novels that have preceded it, Golem Song is an allusive, manic, and wildly comic approach to some of the most serious and difficult cultural questions of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Alan Krieger, a Jewish ER nurse and self-styled "golem of the Grand Concourse," is the antihero of Estrin's third novel, impressive for Alan's verbal pyrotechnics but finally overwhelmed by his motivating pathology. Alan's repulsiveness begins with his grotesquely obese, unhygienic and flatulent body (which is unaccountably appealing to women), but his many minor sins and shortcomings are dwarfed by his outrageous racism. Alan's musings grow increasingly ugly as his interactions with black people—in the hospital, on the subway, in the Bronx where he lives, and in Harlem where "they" live—both feed and reflect his poisonous obsession. While Estrin foregrounds various prejudices on all sides, it is suffocating to accompany Alan in his accelerating madness, as he sheds the outer skins that make his life at all tenable—his family; his girlfriends, a German psychiatrist and a Jewish social worker; his job —and hurtles into his fate over the six-month course of the novel. Like Alan, the book's 1999 veers unsteadily between millennial homeboys, Taxi Driver, Bernard Goetz and post-Holocaust Jewish anger, and Alan's ugliness can't hold it all together. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

In his edgy and satirical novels, Estrin hijacks historical figures and impudently improvises on the works of his literary superiors. In Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Estrin riffs on Kafka; here he commandeers John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Estrin's latest vitriolic tale is set in New York in 1999 and stars a fat, angry, and gross Jewish registered nurse named Alan Kreiger. Aggressively pedantic and manipulative, Alan lives in filth with a boa constrictor and juggles two girlfriends (what they see in him is beyond comprehension), one a German psychiatrist, the other a Jewish social worker. Confronted by violence, madness, and hate in the emergency room and anti-Semitism on the street, Alan is driven over the edge. Estrin's abrasive antihero's commitment to battling false messiahs is morbidly compelling, and his logorrhea is occasionally dazzling. As Estrin raises a host of tough moral questions, drags philosopher Martha Nussbaum into the unsavory proceedings, and tinkers with the story of the golem, his mind-bending humor is at once intellectual and ribald. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Unbridled Books (October 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932961232
• ISBN-13: 978-1932961232
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,212,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, Vermont.

OR
Marc Estrin's world line approximates a cross between a fungal mycelium and a Rube Goldberg device. Biologist, theater director, EMT, Unitarian minister, physician assistant, puppeteer, political activist, college professor, cellist and conductor, he is baffling, even unto himself.

OR, Alternative:
Marc Estrin was hired to teach theater at Goddard College, but in this departmentless utopia, wound up also teaching music, writing, Finnegans Wake, math, physics, medical self-help and "crazy courses" like Philosophy for Dishwashers, an audio-based lecture/discussion series to sweeten the life of cafeteria volunteers. Such are the fruits of liberal education.

OR, Even more alternative:

Marc Estrin grew up in a small apartment so full of books you had to walk sideways in the hall. Of these, he read not one -- till age sixteen, when he gave up his literary virginity to Franz Kafka: The Trial was his introduction to the larger life. This explains much. A mediocre student in high school, he was teased by his father into reading The Magic Mountain during the summer before college. Epiphany! The book was for him a topo-map of western thought and culture. With Mann as his guide, he sailed through college and grad schools, making a Hegelian leap out of graduate science into the richer, if iffier area of the arts. The Vietnam war and Bertolt Brecht were his siren callers into political activity, and his professional theater work dissipated into organizing, college teaching and communal living. When these ceased to put food on the table, he reached back into a past life to study and practice medicine. With the computer came the possibility of writing without retyping -- a stimulus sufficient to have resulted in his current crop of manuscripts, published and unpublished.