Customer Reviews

The Jewish Messiah

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm torn on this book. On the one hand it was one of the most beautifully written things I have ever read. Some sentences I would read over and over because they were so beautiful and unique.

However the story...the story was good enough to keep me reading for the 400+ pages of the book...but I don't think it was because it was good I think it was because I thought maybe at some point it would make sense or get to the point. It was almost like the story was just the summary on the book jacket stretched out ridiculously with insane attention to mundane detail. I'd say 75% of the book doesn't move the story along.

Also the characters...they are incredibly 1-dimensional. Which is strange because the author delves into the inner thoughts and emotions of the main character extensively. But they are merely described, not explained. All of characters face some of the most nightmarish situations ever conjured in fiction but their reactions are completely alien and inhuman. Like I found myself waiting to find out that everyone turned out to be a serial killer or psychologically disturbed in some way. But they weren't, they were all supposedly "normal."

I suppose you could read social commentary into it. However, in my opinion, it doesn't make any such commentary very clear. Any message from the book would be completely a matter of interpretation and reading whatever you want into the text.

All in all, I sort of regret spending all of the time I spent reading the book because it failed to deliver any sort of point and wasn't entertaining enough for that to be the point. However it wasn't an unenjoyable waste of time as the writing was...poetic without being flowery. The author and translator are obviously masters of language. And I suppose the best praise I can give the story was that it was crafted in such a way that I can forgive myself for expecting there to be more to it than there turned out to be.

Imagine Woody Allen and the Marquis de Sade had a child, not a bastard, but one they fussed over and nurtured and sent to the best schools: he might have written this horrible, vicious, hilarious, totally true book, whose tasteless provocations upon motherhood, philosophy, art, and friendship are matched by a quixotic cruelty to cheeses. The translated prose is like the best martini: ice-cold, and crystal clear, with an instant head rush, and the subtlest whiff of foreignness in vermouth. Beware: it is a very stiff drink.

I've just closed the final (digital) page of The Jewish Messiah, and I am currently rapt with that pungent cross between nausea and sadness that comes only with the most guttural experiences in life. I'm so traumatized that buying the rest of Grunberg's books that have so far been translated into English seems like a necessity, but also like one of the biggest risks I could possibly take. It's like choosing to meet that illicit lover just one more time, to say goodbye, knowing the feelings he'll endow you with will never let you rest.

I was intrigued by the synopsis on the book jacket, but wish I had limited myself to just that. The author writes beautifully. Some sentences were absolute magic. However, the plot, or lack thereof left me dazed and confused at the end of the book. Had this been a shorter, more concise work, I think I wouldn't have felt so very cheated by the ending. I guess I could have stopped reading on page 300 or so, but like Awromele, I couldn't say "no."

This book is nothing more than x-rated pornography dressed up as a "novel". It has no plot and the Jewist author seems to be obsessed with the "C" word (unfit to publish here). Grunberg's 'messiah' seems to be Xavier Radek's testicle (kept "safe and sound" in a jar), Israel's nuclear weapons cache that is launched at all the 'Aryan' countries of the world (represented by the pelican on the cover), and Xavier himself (who's renamed ha-Radek). I threw it away in the trash after I read it. I can't recommend this excrement to anyone, ever.

30 seconds after opening this book i knew i had been had...can any rational,thinking,intelligent person consider this "writing" to be anything but a sick joke...incredidibly bad..vulgar and juvenile...asking for an impossible suspension of disbelief..i literally laughed out loud so many times that i thought maybe the totality of the idiocy contained in this tome of excrement was intentional..but i don't think the "author" is that crafty. easiest the worst waste of money since i went all in with a pair of dueces...ugh....