Customer Reviews

The Messiah of Stockholm

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

 

 

Reading The Messiah of Stockholm was my very first encounter with any of Ozick's fiction (I had previously read some of her New Yorker essays). The novel truly is one of the most intense and beautifully-written pieces I have ever read. There were moments when I read passages aloud, wanting to memorize those passages. Harold Bloom, in fact, considers it to be Ozick's best work. I recommend Messiah for anyone who hasn't yet stumbled across any of her fiction--a perfect beginning point, I think, despite that it is relatively fresh in comparison to her other works. Set to classical music, this novel is an aethetically-moving experience.

I have read many Cynthia Ozick books, and have found this one to be one of the most memorable, equally for its compelling subject and for its somewhat confounding narrative. It is a slender book, more of a novella than a novel. As other reviewers have pointed out, it's based loosely on the life and works of Bruno Schultz, who has often been compared to Kafka. To have the most rewarding experience with The Messiah of Stockholm, I would strongly recommend starting with Schultz's The Street of Crocodiles, and any other material about Schultz you can get your hands on. Familiarizing yourself with Schultz's fiction as well as at least the rough outline of his life story will be important in understanding Ozick's references in The Messiah. I would also recommend starting with the Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories - another Cynthia Ozick book that might be a more digestible and enjoyable introduction to her intellectually powerful writing and philosophies than this one.

Ozick's sentences are so wonderfully crafted that I feel like I am in the Louvre of writing when I read her. This is just the second book by her that I have read and I am just delighted. It is true, as one reviewer stated, that she maintains a certain distance from her characters, but that allows them to be less predictable, and a greater level of irony can also then by limned. This small novel about an alienated, sad "Monday reviewer" of books in Stockholm, orphaned, who believes he is the son of a murdered Jewish Pole who wrote surrealistic material is a lovely (but sad) story of self definition, inspiration, success/failure, trust. I recommend it strongly to anyone who loves good writing.

I am a slow & easily bored reader yet I finished the book in 2.5 days. I couldn't put it down! Cynthia Ozick crafts a great story with the remains of enigmatic Polish Jewish writer/artist Bruno Schulz. She fulfilled my wishes, by adding modern substance to the life of this fragile, ephemeral visionary. Ms. Ozick creates a fictional path, using landmarks from Schulz's life. I was interested to see how the WW2's aftermath redounds upon Sweden (I naïvely say,"of all places.")

Our view of Bruno Schulz & so many other creative artists--our very patrimony--remains blocked by the ramifications of the Nazi Holocaust. This novel provides a glimpse of that as well as intrigue, Stockholm newspaper office politics, orphancy,deception & Ozick's eidetic extrapolation of Schulz's lost Messiah. I recommend it!

This is the story of Lars Andemening, a Stockholm reviewer of obscure literary works who believes he is the orphaned son of Bruno Schulz, a renowned Jewish writer murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland. Lars believes that his father's missing manuscript, The Messiah, is awaiting his discovery; he has built his solitary and eccentric life around all-things-Schulz with the help of an equally eccentric ally/opponent bookseller, Mrs. Eklund. When a young woman surfaces claiming to be the daughter of Schulz and the holder of The Messiah, Lars carefully constructed reality falls apart.

This is the first work of Cynthia Ozick's that I have ever read, so place my zeal within the context of the newly converted if you like. For true literary lovers -- for whom the point of reading is not to be swept by plot to some dubiously satisfying conclusion, but to be strummed, teased, taunted and caressed by words -- Cynthia Ozick is a blessing. She is a true wordsmith: as confident in her ability to raise even the lives of mice within office walls to a place of poetic beauty as she is to document the affect of violent social change on individuals and communities. Her characterization of Lars as captive in a history that may or may not be truly his painfully encapsulates the orphan-refugee experience. And her depiction of the literary world -- with its authors, publishers, reviewers, and sellers -- is both so charming and biting that you can't help but reexamine your role as a reader within it.

I recommend this work for readers who enjoy being swept along in beautiful prose and who seek out literature that begs to be read again and again and again.

Ozick has constructed a remarkably intelligent narrative, but in the end, her portrait of Bruno Schulz is more interesting than her protagonist. Even her supporting cast is more dimensional and fully rendered than her main character. Ozick displays a beautiful wit, but her story leaves us begging for something more engaging

I have read many works of Cynthia Ozick and highly esteem her writing. This work which comes highly touted by both Michiko Kakutani and Harold Bloom in NY Times Reviews I just could not get into. The beginning idea of having the main character a refugee who believes his father is Bruno Schultz never really got me. The character himself Lars Andemining a mediocre book- reviewer twice- married twice divorced father of one small girl makes the obsession with Schultz the center of his life. Somehow the characters he meets including the book- store owner Mrs. Ekland and the woman who claims to be Schultz's daughter, and shows up with an alleged manuscript of Schultz's lost masterpiece " The Messiah" are not fleshed out in a strong way.

Many readers have spoken about the pleasure of reading of Ozick's complex language.

Again I just could not get into the work, feel, sympathize, identity in any way with the characters.

It may just be my fault that I was not such a good reader on this one.

Ozick creates a wonderful piece of literature here. She writes a work of terrific narration, with extraordinary language as is her specialty, yet it has a very different feel to it than most of her work. It has a spiritual feel, where she does not give us the same level of clarity and conciseness of description. Instead, she rather allows events to unfold almost by chance. The style is reminiscent of that of Philip Roth and in fact, it was interesting to find on the dedication page the simple words, "To Philip Roth."

Ozick's protagonist, Lars, is a book reviewer for a Stockholm newspaper. He has a penchant for old European literature, particularly Czech, Polish and Serbo-Croatian authors. He lives in a spiritual world of existentialism and extremis of the human condition. Yet, the obsession if you will, is much more, because Lars, an orphan, has decided or convinced himself that he is the son of a famous and dead Polish author.

The plot and concepts swirl around the reader as Lars seeks to find a lost manuscript and any other information that he can about the author. Lars is a creature of the night. He does not like the hustle and bustle of the office during daytime hours. He is a completely private person, and keeps his secret very close to his vest, except for his disclosure to the proprietor of a small but esoteric book shop. With her, he tells all. And she is fully drawn into it. At least, that is what it clearly seems to Lars.

But Lars is too personally caught up in his own thing to really detect the deceit. Lars is blinded by a vision of what he believes is his own father's eye, which comes to him in dreams. So he continues to work with the lady at the bookstore to get all that he can about his `father.' Until, one day a person shows up, with the lost manuscript, claiming to be the daughter of the famous Polish author. At some point in that occurrence, Lars realizes, his confidence has been preyed on by others.

Lars' reviews do not carry a lot of stock with the public. The old and gone literature that he tries constantly to "resurrect" is of little interest to the Stockholm public. Yet Lars is fixated on all that is written around and about the time of his father's existence. In the end, Lars finds prominence and success, by giving up his obsession and writing well received reviews of current Swedish and American authors. All of a sudden he has his own cubicle. Then Lars gets a newspaper column on Tuesday as well as Monday. And finally, he has totally conformed to the daytime world of the wild "stewpot" that constitutes the daylight work world. But still, Lars is left with the questions of his past. These are never fully resolved.

The book is recommended to all lovers of great current literature. The writing is phenomenal. And the story is highly interesting and engaging.

While I can appreciate, from a distance, the aspects of this book others could use to cite it as a great piece of writing, I found myself frustrated by the narrative balance that Ozick used to tell its story. I didn't feel like there was any spot where i could truly jump into the text and hold on. The characters outside of the main character were all very apathetic and one-dimensional, and i felt like the actions Lars (the main character) took towards them, and which were supposedly the driving points of the novel, were not satisfying emotionally due to the simple fact that I had no place from which to appreciate them. For a 140 page book, i think it was a task Ozick shouldn't have sought out to take by striving to cram so many esoteric and subjective aspects of text at the expense of character or plot development. A dissapointing and unsatisfying read.

One of the worst books I read last year.