Praise for Cesare
Wingate Prize Long List
“Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words. Cesare is by no means lightweight fare, but it’s provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying.” —Washington Post
“It’s a dark art to make a subject this grotesque quite this much fun.” —Wall Street Journal
“Darkly resonant. . . . [A] convention-upturning tour de force.” —Washington Independent Review of Books“Spectacular. . . . This extraordinary tour de force showcases [Charyn] at the top of his game.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[An] edgy, hallucinatory, full-throttle fable.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[Charyn’s] taut story line is full of surreal visuals and elaborate illusions.” —Booklist
“A complex and detailed story of the inner workings of the German Third Reich during World War II. . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal
“Charyn has created a terrific cast of original characters who speak in a language that reflects the selfish and predatory nature of that time. . . . He tells a fascinating story of resistance against evil with a great deal of energy.” —Historical Novels Review
“Deftly written and original. . . . Unreservedly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review
“Charyn conjures up a narrative punctuated with powerful imagery. . . . In a novel full of its share of the grotesque, it takes an artist with a precise touch such as Charyn to achieve such artful results.” —Comics Grinder
Select Praise for Jerome Charyn
“Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.” —Tom Bissell
“Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.” —Michael Chabon
“Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination.” —William Giraldi
“[Charyn’s] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” —Jonathan Lethem
“One of our most rewarding novelists.” —Larry McMurtry
“Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy―a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books
“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker
“One of our most intriguing fiction writers.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Absolutely unique among American writers.” —Los Angeles Times
“A contemporary American Balzac.” —Newsday
“Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively. . . . The result is at once surprising and very entertaining.” —BookPage
“For half a century, [Charyn] has been an unpredictable, unclassifiable, and above all exactingly smart author.” —Open Letters Review
“Charyn makes artful use of historical fact and fiction’s panache.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Wherever he takes us, Charyn’s mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric.” —Jewish Book Council
★ 2019-09-30
In Nazi Germany, an orphan boy of lowly origins grows up to become an enforcer for German military intelligence and the helpless pawn of a vixen-ish mystery woman.
Half-Jewish orphan Erik Holdermann was raised by prostitutes from the age of 9 before being sent to an orphanage. When it is discovered there that he has a living uncle—albeit a cruel and distant one who disowned Erik's late mother for marrying a postman—he is sent to the uncle's farm, where he is regularly beaten up by boys wearing Nazi pins and nearly dies after becoming trapped in a barn during a frigid winter storm. Erik's life takes a momentous turn during cadet school when, with a show of brute force, he saves a man being beaten by a gang of street toughs; that man turns out to be Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, head of the military intelligence service. Canaris takes Erik under his wing, dubs him Cesare (a reference to the "magician" in the silent film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and counts on him to threaten or disappear anyone who gets in his way. That can mean someone from the Gestapo or SS—even as he serves the Nazi regime, Canaris is dedicated to saving or safely exporting Jews. Erik's half-Jewish mystery woman, Lisa Valentiner, with whom he has been obsessed since he was a boy, is both a member of the Jewish underground and the wife of a Nazi officer. It's a nebulous world in which the Gestapo, which recognizes the need for Jews in any spy network, employs half-Jews to lure other half-Jews out of hiding. The 82-year-old Charyn's latest work in a distinguished career is subtitled "a novel of war-torn Berlin," but that doesn't begin to prepare readers for this edgy, hallucinatory, full-throttle fable. Cabaret, Moby-Dick, Shakespeare, Rosa Luxembourg, "Jewish jazz," traveling executioners dubbed Hansel and Gretel, a hump-backed baron—they're all in the mix.
A darkly entertaining, eye-opening novel.
