The Jewish Messiah: A Novel - Hardcover

Arnon Grunberg wrote his first novel, Blue Mondays, a European bestseller that won the Anton Wachter Prize for debut fiction, at age twenty- three, and his work has been translated into twenty-one languages. He was born in Amsterdam in 1971, dropped out of school at age seventeen, and started his own publishing company two years later. Two of his novels, Phantom Pain and The Asylum Seeker, won the AKO Literature Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize. In 2002 it became clear that the mysterious Viennese writer Marek van der Jagt, who made his debut with the novel The Story of My Baldness, was Arnon Grunberg. The Story of My Baldness also won the Anton Wachter Prize, making Grunberg the only novelist to have won it twice. Grunberg writes columns, book reviews, and essays for various Dutch and Belgian newspapers and magazines and a blog for the literary magazine Words without Borders. He lives in New York.

Mockingly irreverent and verging on the fantastical, Grunberg's satirical comedy featuring a contemporary messiah will amuse some readers and offend others. When Swiss teenager Xavier Radek meets Awromele Michalowitz, a rabbi's son, decides it is his life's mission to comfort the Jews to atone for their suffering. Idealistic and naïve to the point of foolishness, Xavier is a contemporary version of the Jewish folkloric character Gimpel the Fool. Never mind that his grandfather was a superzealous Nazi, and his mother thinks that You-Know-Who had the right idea in exterminating the Jews. Both young men acknowledge the erotic bond between them, first evidenced when Xavier undergoes a botched circumcision. As the action moves from Basel to Amsterdam to Tel Aviv in a series of farcical adventures involving violence, brutality, lust and jealousy, the novel reveals a world made up of bigots and complacent hypocrites. Grunberg's iconoclastic novels are bestsellers in Europe, where they have won numerous literary awards. He has a fine touch for the ridiculous and the macabre, but by the time Xavier becomes the corrupt prime minister of Israel and metamorphoses into a modern Hitler, this abrasive satire becomes an open wound. (Jan.)
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