A Guide to the Perplexed - Softcover

Atzmon, Gilad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852428260 ISBN 13: 9781852428266

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2003

Synopsis

The year is 2052, and the state of -Israel has been defunct for 40 years, the majority of its citizens having become refugees overseas. Gunther loves European, especially German, women and soon leaves Israel to find fame, fortune and fornication in Germany, whose collective guilt-trip is a goldmine for the licentious professor. A darkly funny reflection on the dangers of racial purity and the position of the outsider in Western Europe,A Guide to the Perplexed marries the playfulness of Nabokov with the sexiness of Philip Roth. It is an angry rant on the effects of ethnic cleansing both our bodies and our minds.

Gilad Atzmon was born and grew up in Israel. An outspoken anti-Zionist, he now lives in London.

About this title

Reviews

Debut novelist Atzmon has penned a comic polemic against his fellow Israelis, set in the near future, soon after the collapse of the Jewish homeland. The novel takes the form of an autobiography by Gunther Wunker, who grows up in Ramat Gan in the 1960s and never feels comfortable with Israel's triumphalist culture. He leaves in the 1980s, believing that "the people around me were becoming more stupid, more blind, more credulous, more pious and less and less in touch with reality." He resettles in Germany, where he becomes an esteemed expert in voyeurism and takes advantage of Holocaust guilt to seduce Aryan women. From there, he observes the demise of Israel and its rebirth as the State of Palestine. Gunther's account of the unraveling of Israeli society is frustratingly vague, relying on familiar Jewish stereotypes ("the Hebrew... was revealed as a type full of bombast and lacking in dignity, exposing his soft belly for money or a powerful gesture"). Atzmon's tone and premise may remind readers of Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles, as well as Philip Roth's novels about Israel. But too many of Atzmon's satirical riffs-on the vengeful pleasure of sex with German women, on Israel's meager cultural and intellectual contributions, on the ironic thrill of a Jew preferring Germany to Israel-have been given voice in Roth's novels with more acuity. Atzmon clearly wants to provoke, but his approach is so familiar that few readers will take the bait.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852428260
• ISBN 13: 9781852428266
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160