Benjamin's Crossing

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In a lyrical novel of ideas, Jay Parini tracks Walter Benjamin through his last, terrible months--in his desperate flight from Paris in 1940 culminating in his frantic escape over the Pyrenees into Spain.

FROM THE CRITICS

Robert Grudin

Parini's story is at once painstakingly researched and dramatically recounted. -- NY Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

In a formidable display of intellectual and imaginative sympathy, Parini ("The Last Station", etc.) novelizes the life and death of Walter Benjamin, one of the major literary and cultural critics of the 20th century. A German Jew whose circle of friends (Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt and Bertolt Brecht among them) reads like a roll call of the great European minds of his era, Benjamin committed suicide in Spain shortly after crossing the Pyrennees in flight from the Nazi occupation of France. Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism who narrates much of the novel, sums up Benjamin well. Lamenting his friend's death, he says: "The European mind has lost its champion, its dauphin, its sweetest prince." On the other hand, Scholem notes that his friend was "an ignoramus when it came to politics." Indeed, the Benjamin that appears in these pages is deeply flawed, narcissistic and detached. Parini paints a portrait of the intellectual as a (brilliant) egoist who can't see the forest for the trees. Settling in Paris with his sister in the wake of Hitler's rise to power, Benjamin, despite his obsession with history in the abstract, is unable to face the reality of Europe's descent into barbarism. Parini intercuts his own translations of some of Benjamin's writings with passages written from the point of view of others, including Scholem and Lisa Fittko, another displaced German leftist, who leads Benjamin from France into Spain. Parini, himself an accomplished critic as well as a novelist and poet, is able both to expose the blind spots of the highbrow European mind, which is easy, and to dramatize and summarize highbrow ideas, which is difficult. His novel is not so much a tragedy as it is a eulogynot just for Walter Benjamin, but for an entire cosmopolitan European intellectual tradition.

Library Journal

In this fascinating novel, novelist and critic Parini ("Bay of Arrows", LJ 8/92), a professor at Middlebury, profiles the last few months in the life of critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who escaped Paris just ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940. Told largely from the perspective of the various intellectuals and radicals that made up Benjamin's circle, the novel depicts Benjamin as a man who possessed a brilliant mind but was tragically unaware of and uninterested in the political state of the world around him. Most importantly, Parini's Benjamin is utterly human. The novel gives the uninitiated some insight into Benjamin's philosophy and may inspire them to delve into his writings, which were underappreciated in his own day but are now revered by many academics. Recommended for all literary collections. Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., Moscow

Kirkus Reviews

A moving, impressively informed novel based on the life of one of the century's most austere, provocative, and tragic intellectuals, Walter Benjamin (18921940).

Parini, a poet, critic ("John Steinbeck", 1995), and novelist ('Bay of Arrows", 1992, etc.), has created not so much a fictional biography of Benjamin as a meditation on the experience of exile and the difficult emergence of modern thought. Born in Berlin in 1892 to a well-to-do Jewish family, Benjamin reflected many of the 20th-century's most turbulent currents. Even as an adolescent, his remarkable critical faculties were evident, and in quieter times, he might have subsided into academia. As it was, he was doomed to an increasingly uncertain living as a critic of art and literature and as a reviewer. He visited Russia in the 1920s after becoming fascinated by Marxism, and left Germany in the 1930s after the rise of the Nazis. He lived uneasily in Paris, doubly suspect for being both Jewish and a possible Communist, was interned for a time by French authorities, then fled to Spain in 1940. He apparently committed suicide soon after arriving there. Parini concentrates on several episodes in Benjamin's life (the period just before and during WWI, Benjamin's visit to Russia, his hard life in Paris in the late '30s, his flight to Spain), and uses several narrators (including his lifelong friend, the scholar Gershom Scholem, and his diffident lover Asja Lacis) to catch something both of Benjamin's brilliance and of his oblique, tormented personality. It's hard, though, to do much more in a novel than suggest something of the man's highly original (and still influential) theories about mass culture and literature. And Benjamin's character (made up in equal parts, it seems, of the bohemian and the scholar) remains somewhat elusive here.

Nonetheless, Parini's portrait of an entire generation of intellectuals overwhelmed by revolution and war, and of their desperate attempts to make sense of their world, is resonant, convincing, and deeply sad.