The Joker [Paperback]

Elena Bruck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2011

Love, madness, and pandemic, The Joker is a dramatic and chilling story of surviving the Avian Flu in today's New York City. Eva, a doctor, and Greg, an aspiring musician, weather the realities of young adulthood: reconciling the dreams and responsibilities of love, work and parenthood -- until a deadly pandemic of Avian Flu puts their humanity to test. Two psychiatrists, a musician, a healer, a crazy nanny and a little boy struggle for survival in a dark, hungry city full of death. Their choices are shaped by horror, love and fate.

“Imagine Oblomov crossed with I am Legend. The Joker grafts the Russian literary tradition of human sympathy with the jarring, graphic momentum of a thriller.”  -Sana Krasikov, author of One More Year

“Elena Bruck has Chekhov's eye for detail and knows how to weave a haunting story."  -Gregory Colbert, author of Ashes and Snow: A Novel in Letters

“Elena Bruck takes us on a deadly journey through plague-ravaged New York City. This psychologically incisive and medically informed thriller is quite different from any other disaster novel I've read. Bruck builds complex and compelling characters, but still manages to keep you on the edge of your seat. I will never look at Stuyvesant Town the same way again.” - Lisa Cohen, PhD, author of The Handy Psychology Answer Book

“A unique, intelligent and exciting New York novel; the city and people as you might know them, suddenly and in a chillingly real way, turned upside down and all but destroyed. An impressive debut. Who but a practicing psychiatrist could give us such depth of dysfunction?” - Rowan Somerville, author of The End of Sleep, and The Shape of Her

Product Details

• Paperback: 386 pages
• Publisher: York House Press; 1st edition (September 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979195683
• ISBN-13: 978-0979195686
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,044,022 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elena Bruck was born in Moscow, Russia, studied Medicine in Vienna, Austria, and is currently an assistant professor of psychiatry at one of New York's hospitals. She lives in the East Village together with her husband and two children.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars the joker November 7, 2011

By molham

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

With love, compassion and tenderness, Elena Bruck constructs unforgettable characters in her beautiful novel. The Joker is a gripping story of love, survival, reminiscence and hope. For me, the most amazing thing was the ability of the author to create the smallest details regarding human behaviors, virtues and aberrations while coming face to face with the horrific reality of death. After reading the novel, the name of the heroine, Eva, will cease to resonate as it had before for the simple reason that she is not just a character in fiction but rather the doctor, mother and lover whom we grow to know quite well, admire immensely and love a lot. She will stay with you long after the novel is done.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars cure for the uncommon cold October 8, 2011

By shkza

Format:Paperback

Elena Bruck's first novel drops comfortably into this unusual (and unusually persistent) age of post-9/11 preoccupation with end-of-days scenarios including global pandemics (Soderberg's "Contagion") or takeover by any of the following: zombies (AMC's "The Walking Dead"; Colson Whitehead's "Zone One"), cognitively amped-up apes (the end of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"), virally mutated former-humans (Justin Cronin's "The Passage"). But unlike all these other stories, "The Joker" is less focused on what the end of humanity does to the characters, and more on what the characters do when confronted with their mortality in the face of humanity's potential end.
"The Joker" stands apart because of the careful attention with which the author, over the first third of the book, unspools the story of a small, fairly nuclear unit - mother, son, father, surrogate father, parents - living their lives and leaving marks on one another in the years before the dark shadow of a deadly flu outbreak descends on them. As a result, we get to see the events that follow the arrival of the flu in New York City refracted through their already damaged emotional landscape, which makes it that much more compelling. There is a true beating heart in the pages of "The Joker" that one rarely sees in a novel that tackles this kind of subject matter, and this is refreshing. The second half of the novel, during which the flu rips through Manhattan and the wider world, rather than seeming to belong to an entirely different book (as was the case with Cronin's overlong and underwritten "The Passage"), is deeply informed by the first half. In effect, the author has carefully crafted a complicated emotional landscape for her characters to navigate, which she then upends as the disease descends over the narrative. This generates the chaos that propels the remainder of book forward with thriller-like momentum. As the flu spreads, Bruck deftly jumps from character to character, showing us the unique perspective of each and the lengths to which they must go to survive.
Both literary and timely, "The Joker" is an impressive debut. It manages the difficult task of fearlessly taking us to some truly dark corners of the human heart without ever losing sight of the light that helps us all find our way back to the surface.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A page turner, with benefits December 26, 2011

By My Impressions

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book, like the proverbial "friend with benefits" provides what you'd expect, and a lot more.

It keeps your interest and makes you want to keep turning pages, as a good Apocalyptic/Sci Fi type work should
But it also, and not incidentally, provides a lot more.
This book, while remaining an engaging, page-turning read, manages to create a thought provoking array of characters and settings.
The book, as a whole, is really an exploration of what it means to survive in the most difficult circumstances, which is another way of saying, to explore what it means to live.

In many ways, I felt as though I were reading a first person account in what is sometimes called Holocaust literature.
The characters, quite convincingly in my opinion, could have been writing from behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, or as someone living in the Soviet famines of the 1930s.
I think that Elana Bruck's experience, as a person born in the former Soviet Union, is surely informed and deepened by her first person sense of recent European History.

I say this not to take away in any respect from the suspense elements of the book --which work very well on that level.
But my lasting impression of the book, and what really makes this worthwhile literature (and it most certainly is that) is that you come away with a renewed appreciation for many things: for your family, and for living in this sane, safe and prosperous place of present day America.

One thing: you may need a little while to get into some of the characters. I say this not as a negative, but to encourage you to go further, as pretty soon you will find it easier going, and then difficult to put down, and ultimately very rewarding.

I sometimes think that we suffer from too many authors, and too many books. But this is a book I'm very glad Elana Bruck has written, and I'm glad to have read it.
I look forward to more from this new author.

FYI I'm "Faith's" husband (writing from her account). I say this as I think that some women writers appeal mostly to women (and vice versa for some male authors). There is indeed an interesting, feminine perspective here, but all to the good. The author is unmistakably a woman, but not limited to a female audience by any means.