The Jewish Messiah

by Arnon Grunberg
Donadio & Olson, Inc.
496 pp.

Rights sold:
Holland: Vassallucci
Italy: Blu Edizioni


Book description:
Xavier Radek, who lives in Basel, is an assimilated non-Jewish young man with a mission: he wants to know more about the suffering of the Jews. So he decides to make it his business to comfort ‘the enemies of happiness’. His grandfather was a Nazi who understood the handiwork of death. His father is a famous architect with a predilection for massage parlours. And then there is his mother, a passionate woman who consistently refers to a certain water-colourist dictator active seventy years ago as ‘You-know-who’.

While his parents dismiss Xavier’s behaviour as a disorder of puberty, he becomes friendly with Awromele, son of a rabbi, who advises him to take Yiddish lessons and to have himself circumcised. After a problematic circumcision, Xavier is confirmed in his Messianic aspirations: he finds solace in painting and leaves for the Venice of the North with Awromele, where he presents himself at the Rietveld Academy while Awromele takes a job filling shelves at the Albert Heijn supermarket.

Across the European desert they move towards the promised land…


Arnon Grunberg (born 1971) lives and works in New York. He has published a number of novels, including Blue Mondays, Phantom Pain and The Asylum Seeker. He also writes as Marek van der Jagt.

Arnon Grunberg has just won the AKO Prize (the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize) for THE ASYLUM SEEKER!


www.vassallucci.nl
www.dejoodsemessias.nl


Praise and Reviews:
“There is no one who writes so much and with such virtuosity as Grunberg… Grunberg writes about a desperate war in the only sensible way possible, by allowing absurdity to triumph. The pace and intrigue hark back to the more farcical novels of the start of his career, Blue Mondays and Silent Extras… Given the world view Grunberg displays in this novel, sparing no one, insulting everyone (they are whores and punters, without exception), one wonders whether with this The Jewish Messiah he may have written his own Satanic Verses.” – Marja Pruis, De Groene Amsterdammer

“Those who believe in the innate wickedness of humanity are in for a hell of a time with The Jewish Messiah… It is one of those novels that needed to be written, and now Grunberg has done so. The insane idea was an obvious one, just waiting to be executed. It is impossible not to admire Grunberg… The writing of The Jewish Messiah is guided by an iron logic… I found this new Grunberg novel fascinating… a truly pernicious book.” – Max Pam, HP/De Tijd

NRC Handelsblad, Friday 17 September 2004
The Knife is Warmer than Humankind
by Pieter Steinz
THE JEWISH MESSIAH by Arnon Grunberg (Vassallucci, 496 pages)

Forget Vestdijk. Having produced eight novels and as many other books in ten years, Arnon Grunberg alias Marek van der Jagt (33) is the only Dutchman of whom it can truly be said that he writes quicker than God can read. So it is quite possible that God was still reading De Asielzoeker (The Asylum Seeker), the novel Grunberg published last year and which has now been nominated for the AKO prize, when De joodse messias (The Jewish Messiah) was launched yesterday. Perhaps He had just reached the penultimate scene in The Asylum Seeker, where protagonist Christian Beck is confronted during a television interview with the crime that changed the course of his life. Beck always thought he had poked a prostitute’s eye out by accident, but now he suddenly asks himself why he remembers it as a moment of triumph. “Perhaps it’s liberating,” he thinks, “finally to do something impermissible, perhaps it’s liberating to let yourself go, to let out everything that has been pent up, to explode without any sense of responsibility.”
Beck’s musings are one way to sum up The Jewish Messiah, an overpowering, sweeping novel in which Grunberg expands upon the main themes of his earlier books (loneliness, wrecked illusions, the struggle against hypocrisy and authority, the legacy of the Holocaust) without worrying about thin skins, old taboos and mother’s china cupboard. Not that the writer has ever paid much attention to political correctness or other manifestations of tact. (...)

The Jewish Messiah, the life story of a grandson of a member of the SS who sets himself up as the comforter of the Jews (“the enemies of happiness”), will cause even greater consternation. Right from the first sentence, in which Xavier Radek’s grandfather is referred to as “not one of those sedentary grandpas who stayed behind their desks […], no, a gentleman who understood the handiwork of death”, right from this first long sentence Grunberg seems indeed “to explode without any sense of responsibility”. (...)

So the central character is able to say to a rabbi in all innocence, “The Jews need Lebensraum too.” He can complain that his Jewish friends fit all the clichés disseminated about them (“Just as some women are asking to be raped, some Jews are obviously asking for a pogrom”). His anti-Semitic mother can allege that “The Israelite is a fascist by nature” and claim that hatred of the Jews is the only love deserving of the name. His orthodox Jewish lover can describe Mein Kampf as a fascinating book (“It has pace, it’s funny, and I get the sense the author has a story to tell”). Add to that the fact that Adolf Hitler is consistently referred to in The Jewish Messiah as ‘You-know-who’, as if he were actually the evil wizard in the Harry Potter books, plus the fact that the final chapter glories in the title ‘The Unjustly Ignored Intellectual Legacy of Streicher and Himmler’, and there can be no doubt that Grunberg intends his new novel as a provocation.
It is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, so Theordor Adorno believed. Paul Celan proved him wrong. No one should make a melodrama out of the persecution of the Jews, was the consensus until the seventies, but after the television series Holocaust all such scruples fell by the wayside. You cannot show Hitler as an ordinary person, so people said, but in Germany the film Der Untergang shows this to be a meaningless assertion. You must not make jokes about the Second World War; you must not criticise Israel; you must have sympathy for the Jews – all outdated idées reçues that Arnon Grunberg, himself a son of Jewish war victims, wants nothing to do with. (...)
Grunberg is an auteur provocateur, (...) an expert at manipulating the media – in the case of The Jewish Messiah not only by leaking the explosive content of the book beforehand and orchestrating his own pre-publicity (an interview he wrote in its entirety for Joods Journaal; going on a publicity tour even before the book went on sale; launching it on Jewish New Year in a kebab shop in Amsterdam), but also by choosing Vassallucci, the publisher of that monument to Jewish culture in The Netherlands, the Jiddische Bibliotheek (Yiddish Library). In fact the new novel is being published simultaneously under a different title, De Grote Jiddische Roman (The Great Yiddish Novel), number 13 in the Jiddische Bibliotheek series, even though there are no more than seventy words of Yiddish in the whole book: two sentences from Hitler’s Mein Kampf as translated by Xavier and his lover Awromele.
Enough about the format of The Jewish Messiah, enough about the author’s persona and enough about the marketing techniques of his new publisher. (To celebrate the publication of The Asylum Seeker Grunberg spent a week on a small boat on the Dutch inland waterways in the company of a goat, which did not prevent the novel about a disillusioned writer from becoming the literary highpoint of 2003.) What matters is the new novel – and it is unique in Dutch literature, the only possible comparison being with the novels of Marek van der Jagt. Similarities to the work of Grunberg’s favourite foreign writers – Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren – are less obvious than they were in Blue Mondays or The Holy Antonio (1998). The only book of which it repeatedly reminded me (apart from Mein Kampf, but for different reasons) was American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Not only because Grunberg’s novel has the same atmosphere of nihilism and cartoon-style violence (he describes a kebab shop owner’s feet being deep-fried), but also because he places the reader inside the mind of a psychopath obeying the laws of his own logic. (...)
Plot is a low priority in The Jewish Messiah, as in most of Grunberg’s books. This is a picaresque novel, given narrative momentum by Xavier’s ambition, as a goy, to become a member of a chosen people and to console them as far as he can. After his phase of swimming with Zionists he takes it upon himself to write the Great Yiddish Novel. After all, “What could be more of a comfort than a novel in a language that everyone says is dying out?.” When he realises that the Great Yiddish Novel has already been written, by You-know-who, he sets out to translate Mein Kampf into Yiddish – a task that will take all his free time for the rest of his life, particularly since he first has to learn Yiddish. (...)
In his self-interview in Joods Journaal, Arnon Grunberg agrees that there are no normal people in his books. He then hastens to add that the normal person is as much a myth as the noble savage. So Xavier is not the only character in The Jewish Messiah to be not quite all there. What should we make of the almost-blind circumciser who has filled his house with kosher cheeses because he does a better trade in them than he does in removing foreskins? Or the autistic rabbi who seems relieved when confronted with resurgent anti-Semitism (“Some days it was no longer clear to him whether he was waiting for the coming of the Messiah or for the coming of anti-Semitism”)?
Xavier Radek finds himself in an insane universe, which will not surprise fans of Grunberg’s work. It is precisely the way the absurdities are dressed up in impeccable logic that makes The Jewish Messiah such a wildly funny book. A circumcision that turns into a bloodbath, a gay-basher who quotes Kierkegaard, a religious leader who thanks God for saving his son by staying away from a massage parlour for three days and not thinking about transsexuals until the end of the month – Grunberg wryly describes all these things in his characteristic style of long breathless sentences alternating with laconic dialogue, (quasi-)philosophical monologues and comic one-liners. (...)


Style is Grunberg’s most important quality. Like Gerard Reve he is a writer whose literary DNA shows through in every paragraph. (In Grunberg’s case this was even confirmed scientifically, when in 2002 an Italian computer programme managed to pinpoint him as the author of Marek van der Jagt’s novel The Story of My Baldness on the basis of an objective comparison of the texts.)
(...) Grunberg’s ‘Great Yiddish Novel’ is much more than a variation on the old theme of a boy who thinks he is the Messiah: it is a treasure trove of beautiful quotes and sick jokes, a polemical settling of scores with the wary attitude of the Dutch to the Jews and to Jewish history, and above all a nightmare vision of the harshness of the world and the loneliness of contemporary life. In all these respects, The Jewish Messiah is a synthesis of the novels of Arnon Grunberg (with all their tragic slapstick) and Marek van der Jagt (featuring perverse protagonists and their attempts to change the world). This is not cheerful fare, no matter how much humour may be served up with the atrocities. But as Prime Minister Radek says to the Hamas leader with whom he is negotiating the distribution of suicide attacks and revenge killings: “Scaring them a bit is good, that’s the function of art. To teach the observer to shudder a little and to wipe the smiles off the faces of those taking part, but the others must be able to keep coming out of their houses to do the shopping.”

Vrij Nederland, 18 September 2004

The Destruction of the World
Arnon Grunberg Saves Mankind
by Jeroen Vullings
THE JEWISH MESSIAH by Arnon Grunberg (Vassallucci, 496 pages)

Will we once again see an injured community rise in revolt after reading (or more likely after seeing inflammatory reports in the media about) The Jewish Messiah? Arnon Grunberg’s new novel can certainly be read as a deliberate provocation. Which is something we have not seen for half a century or so, since the best work of W.F. Hermans and (in those days) Gerard van het Reve.
Two quotations in particular are available to anyone who wants to take up Grunberg’s invitation, both to be found in a monologue by the mother of the main character. The first goes, “The biggest mistake fascism made was to take on the Israelite. If fascism had embraced the Israelite […], then fascism would be a vigorous movement now, the most important movement in Europe. That’s what it would be. Look at the Palestinians. The Israelite is a fascist by nature, it’s in his blood, it flows through his veins.” And then, as if that were not enough, “But if You-know-who (Adolf Hitler – JV) had finished the job, even though I was against it, and still am against it, but if, just imagine, as a thought experiment, then the Middle East would not be the tinder-box it is now. Europe would not now have a tinder-box like that on its doorstep.”

Literal-minded readers will dismiss this out of hand, but – quite apart from the fact that these pronouncements are in a novel – context is of course crucial here. The character speaking is a seriously disturbed woman, and one who still stands by the opinions of her dead father, an SS camp guard. This does not alter the fact that any discussion about such an incendiary subject as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the potential to ruin many an otherwise pleasant evening. So that subtler shades of meaning, certainly those that relate to the freedom of a novelist to conceal himself behind a fictional character, quickly fade.
This is by no means all. The Jewish Messiah seems intended to announce an open season on taboos. The book tackles one loaded subject after another, from Nazi thinking to paedophilia. To achieve this Grunberg allows his protagonist Xavier Radek – a boy in Basel who confronts his own striking similarity in appearance to his lamented grandfather – the freedom to indulge his obsession: ‘the Jews’.
For quite some time, The Jewish Messiah reads like an absurd comedy of misunderstandings. Of course this relates to Xavier’s insane ambition to ‘help’ the Jews.
If Grunberg had kept this up throughout the novel, then the verdict would have been: great craftsmanship, great comic talent, top-class entertainment. But no, he aims higher. At a certain point the tone of the story changes, in the middle of a conversation between Xavier and his mother. She tells him she wanted to poison him as a baby, to be rid of the whole damn business and to get her husband’s attention back. In this conversation Xavier comes across as vulnerable and serious, which strikes an entirely different tone from everything that has gone before. Although we are still following Xavier along his course in life, from this moment on Grunberg allows him to be more than merely a comic character described as a caricature.
Step by step, heavy with the symbolism of downfall, The Jewish Messiah charts the events of Xavier’s life. In the process Grunberg makes clever use of Hitler’s life story and of biographical facts about other popular leaders as well, including Pim Fortuyn. These are often reflected in his characters: Hitler’s failed career as an artist resonates through Xavier’s untalented efforts to become a painter, and the days in the Führerbunker are brought to life in the similar events leading up to Xavier’s death. Grunberg also makes eager use of apocryphal stories about Hitler, including his Jewish ancestry and his homosexuality.
So the fury of The Jewish Messiah builds, travelling a smooth but unpredictable course to its blood-curdling climax. But by the end, certainly by the time mass destruction by nuclear weapons and even the end of the world threaten, the laughter is over. “Our only consolation is destruction,” says Xavier, and he fulfills his own words. Throughout the story, Awromele’s younger sister Rochele has envisaged the Messiah as a pelican, and like a modern-day Cassandra she is proved right. Not because the pelican is a well-known representation of Jesus in Christian iconography, but because it is an image of the kind of nuclear attack that takes place.
So. The Jewish Messiah is out and we can start scattering jubilant adjectives: exciting, witty, moving, but also gruesome, sick, macabre, black and above all diabolical. There can be no doubt that Grunberg develops as a writer with each book. The Asylum Seeker, which must surely be about to win this year’s AKO Literature Prize, raised the question: where can he possibly go from here?
The answer is now right in front of us, a novel in which he not only shows even more control as a novelist but in which he extends his grip on the world even further. A Messiah-like figure was an element of his earlier work too but now – and this is new – the fate of the whole of humanity is at stake. The Third World War is coming and we have no chance, we are doomed. “The last thing to die is hope.”
The main question that remains after reading Grunberg’s phenomenal, high stakes novel, in which he bends both history and the future to his will, is: what does the author want?
He cannot be doing it merely as a literary game or in order to pass the time. First of all the size of the novel (some five hundred pages) makes this seem unlikely, and so does the consistency of his subject matter. The Jewish Messiah is full of echoes of his earlier work. Or, to put it rather better, the earlier prose is subliminally present in this novel, from the slapstick and the celebration of life in the books published under his own name to the revelling in evil of the Marek van der Jagt titles. He proves too lucid in the way he makes the story twist and turn to be merely a truth-sayer determined to vent his own tiresome view of the world. Nevertheless, anyone who reads all of Grunberg’s books one after the other (including all those published under his heteronym Van der Jagt) will be unable to resist his utterly disillusioned take on almost everything and everyone. Almost everything. Because there is one exception: his own literary work. Everything points to the fact that Grunberg has withdrawn into his own fiction and from there he rules the world. Somewhere in The Jewish Messiah he writes, “Because all meaning was fiction, a product of the overzealous imagination.” He declares the whole world to be fiction and by doing so he takes over that world. Not a single blade of glass is allowed to grow outside the world of his fiction. But how bearable is this world, if in The Jewish Messiah the world passes away before our eyes? How long can Grunberg’s last bastion against nihilism survive?
There are two possible answers: either The Jewish Messiah is his last novel, or he will find a way out in his next book.
The ideal moment, then, for a new heteronym.