Arnon Grunberg
The Seattle Times,
2008-03-02
2008-03-02, The Seattle Times

The Jewish Messiah


Haley Edwards

"The Jewish Messiah," the latest novel by quirky Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg, is weird. Very weird. To give you an idea, one of the main characters (the "Messiah" of the title) is an infected, severed testicle named King David. It used to be attached to our hero, Xavier Radek, who now carries it around in a jar "like a pet," consulting it for advice.

But that's just the beginning. We first meet Radek when he's 14 years old. He's the son of two ex-Hitler-supporting parents in Basel, Switzerland. Radek's grandfather, his mother brags, used to torture and murder Jews during the Second World War but "hardly ever on Sundays," she's careful to point out. No one in the family "feels anything. Anything at all."

It's in this climate that Radek realizes he wants to feel suffering. To that end, he decides he needs to be Jewish. He secretly joins a Zionist Youth Group, meets a young Hasidic Jew named Awromele and falls in love with him. Instead of swearing their love for each other, the boys promise through passionate kisses that they'll "never feel anything" for each other: "That's the most important thing."

The pursuit of feeling and not-feeling is the theme of this macabre, heart-wrenching novel. Most of Grunberg's characters are coldly modern. They know about suffering in India, for example and they "adopt" Indian villages to assuage the guilt of that knowing but none of them feel any pain themselves. At first, you'll hate them for their lack of compassion. Then, as the book progresses and life gets more and more terrible you'll begin to wish you felt nothing, too. Rape, child abuse, self-mutilation, terrorist attacks ... all figure in the plot.

Grunberg's tone is serious throughout. He doesn't crack a smile. He doesn't wink at the reader. Where social commentary ends and macabre irony begins is indiscernible.

Still, the novel is beautifully written, with some of its scenes so delicately and gorgeously rendered, in Sam Garrett's translation, that you forget for a moment what they're about. This is the kind of book that reminds you to keep feeling. Things are not so bad. Yet.