February 8, 2010 | Rome, Italy | Partly Cloudy, 2°C
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Fiction

View From the Seventh Layer

Another slew of "unsolvable" stories from fabulist Brockmeier.

A Most Wanted Man

Hamburg, terrorism and disloyalty are Le Carré's bread-and-butter in no. 21.

The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald's "careless people" are preserved in perfect amber.

Jesus' Son

Johnson's story stories about addiction get under the cuticles of starkness.

The White Tiger

Despite the hype, Dostoyevsky is not at risk from Aravind Adiga's Man Booker winner.

The Invention of Curried Sausage

Uwe Timm's modest recollection of post-war German life is gritty and charming.

Ghosts

In Aira's 1990 novel, the ghosts are visible. It's their beckoning that counts.

Temptation

János Székely's period-piece tale is a vivid primer for inter-war Eastern Europe.

Snow Country

The melancholy Kawabata captures love's sad limitations in cold 1950s Japan.

Nonfiction

One Life

Tom Lampert lets Nazi-era "normalcy" damn itself.




BOOK REVIEW
Jews Without Money
By Michael Gold
Carroll & Graff, 1996, . 309 pages

The title says it all: part autobiography, part Marxist screed, this fictional autobiography, first published in 1930, chronicles the life of the Gold family on New York's Lower East Side in the decades around 1900. The cast of characters is a who's who of seedy city life: schnorrers, prostitutes and slumlords.

Gold's prose is primordial, stripped to the bone, yet the story takes unexpectedly tender twists, especially when relating the European childhood of the narrator's parents. At times he seems to have forgotten why they had emigrated in the first place. The book's message is clear, however: America has defeated the old-time religion of the author's immigrant parents and has replaced it with the God of Capitalism.

Instead praying for the Messiah, Gold's protagonist lyrically pines for the coming of the Workers' Revolution. Take it or leave it, it's worth reading for the punchy prose. With an introduction by Alfred Kazin.