From AudioFile
Adam Stein is a Jew, a circus clown, a dog, a beloved mental patient in an upscale Israeli institution shortly after WWII. Thats all the listener needs to know. From that point on, Stefan Rudnickis narration seems more like a poem than a novel. Image piles on image as Rudnicki tells the story in a melodic voice, animated or deadpan as the situation requires. Its as if he alone were born to read these words. The original book was written in Hebrew, and its hard to imagine any subtlety lost in translation. Many listeners will not be engaged with this quirky story, but the more literarily inclined wont want to miss a word and more than likely will listen more than once. R.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
Book Description
The crowning achievement of one of Israel's literary masters,
Adam Resurrected remains one of the most powerful works of Holocaust fiction ever written. A former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths, Adam Stein is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. Alternately more brilliant than the doctors and more insane than any of the patients, Adam struggles wildly to make sense of a world in which the line between sanity and madness has been irreversibly blurred. With the biting irony of
Catch-22, the intellectual vigor of Saul Bellow, and the pathos and humanity that are Kaniuk's hallmarks,
Adam Resurrected offers a vision of a modern hell that devastates even as it inches toward redemption.
