Customer Reviews

The Last Jew: A Novel

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

 

 

Kaniuk's The Last Jew is a big, hulking novel that may only be readable for fans of his other work. Kaniuk has shown himself to be the master of the "standard" form of the novel in early works like Himmo King of Jerusalem, The Acrophile, and Adam the Dog. But even those works were marked by great leaps into the bizarre and fantastic.

Well, The Last Jew is one long excursion into fantasy and experimentation. Most traditional markers of storytelling are eliminated. There are a host of characters; they arrive and disappear; their motives are odd and disjointed. Long fantastic passages are followed by relatively standard sections of narrative. But Kaniuk never lets us really rest. The novel is long and demanding.

And it is about The Last Jew, and about the fate of the Jews. Apparently Kaniuk felt the need to tell the story of the fate of the Jews in a convoluted fashion to mirror the reality of Jewish fate. Whether a reader will want to tackle this ambitious program is doubtful.

"The Last Jew" is an excellent historical view of the Spanish Inquisition during the time of Columbus' journey. It reveals the true side of Isabella and Ferdinand, and it's not flattering. The book is a 'page turner', exciting, suspenseful, with insightful character development, and is not a "Jewish" book. It has broad appeal to anyone who enjoys historical fiction.
I could not give it the fifth star because like so many novels, the ending was weak.