Benjamin's Crossing

Description

There is no such thing as history, you see. It's a dream, perhaps even a dream of a dream . . . Walter Benjamin is dead. One of the most radiant minds of the twentieth century has been snatched away by death in a small town on the border between Spain and France. His thousand-page manuscript, carried the length of France during his flight from the Nazis, has vanished with him, never to be recovered. Jay Parini's extraordinary work traces Benjamin's steps back through time, from the salons of Berlin to the winding roads of Catalonia. A tale of escape and pursuit, Benjamin's Crossing dramatises one of the most moving peripheral episodes of the Holocaust; and above all, it is a love story.

Jay Parini has written eight novels, including The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of Herman Melville and The Last Station, which was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His most recent volume of poetry is New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner and Gore Vidal. Other works include Borges and Me: An Encounter and Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America. jayparini.com

Inspired . . . a piercing, magnificent novel -- AMOS OZ A poignant and eloquent vision of the great critic's personality and fate -- HAROLD BLOOM An exciting adventure story . . . wholly emblematic of our dark age -- GORE VIDAL The friends who recall Benjamin come across as vivid individuals, but it is Benjamin himself who dominates the book, and he is wonderfully, infuriatingly alive, an intellectual hopelessly out of touch with his ailing body, curiously and tragically blind to the Europe disintegrating around him * * The Sunday Times * * Painstakingly researched and dramatically recounted . . . has something important to say about the role of the intellectual in modern Western Society * * New York Times Book Review * * Not only carefully researched but also, more importantly, thoroughly imagined * * Times Literary Supplement * * The distinguished poet, novelist and biographer rescues Benjamin from obscurity, celebrates his intellectual achievements, ponders his passions and eccentricities, and mourns his passing. As re-imagined by Parini, Benjamin's life story becomes a vivid metaphor for the apocalypse that ravaged the civilized world in the mid-20th century and cost the lives of countless millions of men, women and children, Benjamin among them * * LA Times * * A brisk, moving novel containing a parable without confined itself to a parable's two-dimensionality * * New Yorker * * In a formidable display of intellectual and imaginative sympathy, Parini novelizes the life and death of Walter Benjamin, one of the major literary and cultural critics of the twentieth century * * Publisher's Weekly * * Parini's exquisite achievement, and exquisite is exactly the word for his poet's fluid prose, is that the social criticism he channels through Walter Benjamin in this novel is as troubling today as then * * The Philadelphia Inquirer * *