Author: Steve SternPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 144062710X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 411
Book Description
Steve Stern is a consummate spinner of tales whose acclaimed work has been hailed as having the idiosyncratic bounce and antic fever of a Jewish Huck Finn. In his acclaimed new novel he interweaves three narratives about characters who take flight from their ordinary lives and are plunged into extrarordinary circumstances. At the center of it all is an unfinished manuscript — an fictional adventure about a fallen angel named Mocky and his half mortal son Nachman, who both take up residence on New York's Lower East Side circa 1910. Their story has been written by Nathan Hart, a timid proofreader for The Jewish Daily Forward, who woos a young woman named Keni with his exotic tale as he creates it, and who is eventually drawn into a dangerous Jewish underworld of arsonists, horse poisoners, and thieves. More than half a century later, Keni, on her deathbed, gives Nathan's now tattered manuscript to her wayward young nephew, Saul, with the injunction that Saul complete the novel himself. Saul's evasion of the task prompts a picaresque journey into the crucible of the sixties, one fueled by sex, drugs, and the dust of a golem in the attic of a medieval synagogue in Prague. Dexterously juggling the stories of Saul, Nathan, and Mocky, Stern has created a magical tour de force of the storytellers art, one that celebrates the turbulent romance between past and present, art and obsession.