Weinstock Among The Dying [Hardcover]

Michael Blumenthal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1993

In Michael Blumenthal s extraordinary and powerful first novel, Martin Weinstock finds himself much like Dante, having lost his way in mid-life, trapped in the to-him-deathlike corridors of academic life and aborted loves. Adopted at birth by his biological aunt and uncle, then prevented from mourning the death of his adopted mother, Weinstock attempts to navigate the twin burdens of aborted mourning and confused parentage toward a vision of life that is at once good-natured and redeeming. Unable to reconcile the seriousness and self-importance of academic life at Harvard with his own sense of life s mixed texture of humor and sadness, Martin jointly confronts both Harvard s institutional self-absorption and his own wide array of human foibles. En route, he learns as he searches for genuine love and internal well-being that not only humor and seriousness but life and death can coexist and may, if fact, rely on one another for their redemption. Weinstock Among the Dying delves into one man s attempt to recover from the griefs of his childhood and to enter into a life-giving adulthood of fatherhood and mature love, In it, Michael Blumenthal creates a moving portrait of the human struggle for psychological growth, as well as a witty satire of life at the top of the academic world.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To poet Martin Weinstock, disgruntled lecturer at Harvard, the Ivy League school is a deadly place, rife with faculty suicides yet smug with an insular narrowness of vision. Blumenthal's graceful, wise, moving first novel begins as a savage, hilarious satire of academia and the literary world, then plunges into Weinstock's painstaking self-analysis, a process that sometimes becomes tedious. Weinstock, who flits joylessly from one lover to the next in comedic erotic scenes reminiscent of Philip Roth, seethes with anger and self-pity. As he recalls growing up in Manhattan, we learn that he was adopted shortly after birth by his aunt and uncle, uneducated German-Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Weinstock discovered that his adoptive mother was really his aunt only after she died of cancer when he was ten. Through psychoanalysis, he finally comes to terms with his suppressed grief over her death, and by the book's end he confronts the legacy of his biological parents, learns to accept his feelings and becomes a father. Blumenthal, a poet and former creative writing director at Harvard, has written an engrossing narrative: death-obsessed, life-affirming and, like all good novels, resonant with meaning.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Poet Blumenthal's morbidly funny though often contrived first novel is the angst-laden story of poet Martin Weinstock, a mournful Lothario appointed to Thanatos U. (read: Harvard)--a place, he says, where "death is a mere formality." Traded as a baby by his poor, immigrant parents to a childless, ailing aunt and uncle in exchange for a New Jersey chicken farm, Weinstock notes that "womb" rhymes with "tomb" and rates himself "among the dying" since infancy. At Thanatos, he and his colleagues carp and whine like Woody Allen and Billy Crystal, trading one-liners about tenure, the "dead" literary canon, department death notices (which he feels are redundant), and the "frauds" on the faculty. Weinstock has numerous ill-fated affairs, one ending with a student's abortion, and it seems no accident that a woman named Beatrice leads him from his sex-and-death wilderness to a salvation of sorts. Uneven, but worth a look for large collections.
- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc. , Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 303 pages
• Publisher: Zoland Books; 1st edition (September 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0944072348
• ISBN-13: 978-0944072349
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,206,873 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Blumenthal graduated from the Cornell Law School with a J.D. degree in 1974, after studying philosophy and economics at the State U. of New York at Binghamton. His seventh book of poems, And, was published by BOA Editions in May, 2009. A graduate of Cornell Law School and formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has recently been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from the German, French and Hungarian, he practices psychotherapy with Anglophone expatriates in Budapest and spends summers at his house in a small village near the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary. In May of 2007, he spent a month in South Africa working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation in Phalaborwa, an experience about which he has written for Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine. He currently holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He was the featured poet at The Power of Writing Journal Conference in Denver in June of 2008, and currently holds The Copenhaver Visiting Chair of Law at The University of West Virginia College of Law. He can be reached at: www.michael-blumenthal.com