The Jewish Messiah: A Novel - Softcover

Arnon Grunberg is the author of Blue Mondays, an international bestseller that won the Anton Wachter Prize for a debut novel. He is also the author of Phantom Pain, which won the AKO Prize (the Dutch equivalent of the Booker). He currently lives in New York City.

Sam Garrett has won prizes and appeared on short lists for some of the world’s most prestigious literary awards for his translations of some 30 novels and works of non-fiction. Garrett is the only translator to have twice won the British Society of Authors’ Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation (in 2003 and again in 2009). In 2012, his translation of The Dinner by Herman Koch spent two months on the New York Times bestseller list and became the most popular Dutch novel ever translated into English. Garrett’s translation of Tim Krabbe’s The Rider is considered a cycling cult classic. Other works of his have been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2005 and 2013), the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award (2010), the PEN Translation Prize (2014), and the Best Translated Book Award (2014). He divides his time between Amsterdam and the French Pyrenees.

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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