Benjamin's Crossing

When Walter Benjamin, a German Jew, died in Spain during World War II, Europe was deprived of "the most subtle mind of [his] generation." Benjamin, a philosopher, historian, and literary critic, was a colleague of some of Europe's most influential thinkers during the period between the two world wars. Deeply involved in the intellectual aspects of history, Benjamin, however, became a prisoner of the world of ideas, a man who neither understood nor recognized the immediate political realities of the Nazi threat, preferring to sit "in glory above the fray, on an alabaster cloud." Refusing to leave Paris until almost all avenues of escape were closed, Benjamin's indecisiveness about escape and his insistence on toting his 1000-page manuscript on the history of Parisian arcades may have cost him his life. Parini's imagery here is often stunning, and his prose so smooth it is almost melodic in its flow. Using several points of view, he allows Benjamin's friends and acquaintances to recall episodes in Benjamin life, creating emotional power from their reminiscences after Benjamin's death in Spain. First-person accounts by Lisa Fittko, a real person who helped Benjamin and others escape through the Pyrenees into Spain, are particularly powerful, giving immediacy and drama to Benjamin's attempted escape on foot. Quotations from Benjamin's own philosophical writing give a sense of reality to a man who otherwise refused to become engaged in the realities of his time. Unfortunately, Benjamin himself is phlegmatic, and Parini is often forced to "tell about" his life, rather than recreating it for the reader. Because he is distanced, both by his own personality and Parini's narrative style, Benjamin never really comes to life as do his friends, such as Fittko, Jewish mystic Gershom Scholem, and Russian Marxist Asja Lacis, who, in addressing us directly, create scenes which are full of vitality. Still, this novel about Benjamin as "the European Mind writ large" is endlessly fascinating, a thoughtful eulogy for all that has been lost to posterity. Mary Whipple

This book is among the top three I read last year. It tells the story of Walter Benjamin, the German/Jewish thinker, who happened to be in the middle of Europe during the dark times of the Third Reich's apogee.Mr. Benjamin makes a very interesting character, with his obssession for true and pure knowledge and his inability to deal with people or the terrible times he was facing.The author, Mr. Parini, has a very pleasant style, constantly changing the point-of-view in the narrative, in a way that we can understand every character in a much more deep sense.Walter Benjamin was nobody to me before I had read this book, and I must say I have bought two books with his writings since then. The same goes to Mr. Parini, since I bought his other book "The Last Station", which deals with the last days of Russian writer Leo Tolstoi.This book is definitely worth reading. It is very touching since and it is hard not to feel any simpathy for a character with such a complicated personality. Also, it is based in true facts, this people really existed and the book is very well written. The most exciting parts of his escape read like a thriller. By the time you end this book, I doubt if you won't feel any shame for a regime that sacrificed so many bright minds for nothing. I sure did.

This book is among the top three I read last year. It tells the story of Walter Benjamin, the German/Jewish thinker, who happened to be in the middle of Europe during the dark times of the Third Reich's apogee. Mr. Benjamin makes a very interesting character, with his obssession for true and pure knowledge and his inability to deal with people or the terrible times he was facing.The author, Mr. Parini, has a very pleasant style, constantly changing the point-of-view in the narrative, in a way that we can understand every character in a much more deep sense.Walter Benjamin was nobody to me before I had read this book, and I must say I have bought two books with his writings since then. The same goes to Mr. Parini, since I bought his other book "The Last Station", which deals with the last days of Russian writer Leo Tolstoi.This book is definitely worth reading. It is very touching since and it is hard not to feel any simpathy for a character with such a complicated personality. Also, it is based in true facts, this people really existed and the book is very well written. The most exciting parts of his escape read like a thriller. By the time you end this book, I doubt if you won't feel any shame for a regime that sacrificed so many bright minds for nothing. I sure did.

This is a book that I turned to with some scepticism. I admire Jay Parini enormously as a poet, novelist and essayist but this new project: to "novelize" Benjamin's last years seemed excessively ambitiousess. How do you add flesh and bones to this melancholic man of letters, this Marxist rabbi or magic lanternist as some have described? What can be added to Benjamin's own work, his letters and the reflections written by friends and comrades? Well Benjamin's Crossing is both a marvellous, magical and intensely moving novel. Parini gives Benjamin a sexual and emotional life which sensously combines with Benjamin's mental life. By the end of the novel I was so immersed in the figure of Benjamin, so moved by him, that I wanted Parini to re-write history, which of course he could not. If there are any ambitious filmmakers out there this would make a compelling and yet daunting movie.

It is difficult to accept the reality that you are not a 'desirable' person because you are of a different religion. Denial is the first escape mechanism that many turn to for their reason to live. So it was with Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish intellectual living in post-Weimar Germany. His attitude to the popularity and growth of Hitler and his Nazi 'cronies' was that they would not last long and that their blatant anti-Semitism was a "passing phase". Benjamin beloved that because he was part of the 'literati' he was above the ostracizing, beatings, killings and deportations to concentration camps that the 'other' Jews were experiencing. To Benjamin, his works and his research would save him from the fate of the 'other' Jews. When reality finally took hold of him in Paris, France, in 1939, Benjamin, who had been detained by the French "for his own good" finally realized that he must escape the city he loved in order to see his life's work published. Through his old associates and his unconscious need to relocate to the Jewish Homeland of Palestine, Benjamin planned his escape through Spain to Palestine. The trip through "Vichy" France is as 'first person' an adventure as one would want to experience without the actual 'smell and feel' of that experience. Benjamin's "juvenile" belief that he would be saved because he was an intellectual and totally apolitical proved to be a false notion. He, like all other Jews throughout Europe, became expendable to the Nazi killers. The loss of such a vital, intellectual person, at his own hand, is a show of how many Jews throughout Europe felt about their futures. That death by their own hands was more palatable than a slow death at the hands of the Nazi executioners. For all those readers who either know of Walter Benjamin's writings, his personal life or are curious about who he was, this book (even though it is fictional) is a great introduction to this most interesting man, his personal relationships and his writings.