#Elixir of immortality onigiri full#

#Elixir of immortality onigiri full#

Call it, then, the humanity-besotted outpouring of a sublime and tragic jester.' - Cynthia Ozick 'A Dan Brown novel done right, full of wit and mystery. In its mammoth scope and aspiration, The Elixir of Immortality is like no other contemporary novel. Not Gogol's nose, not Cyrano's, but the Shylockian nose of endemic Jew-hatred, here laughingly magicked into mockery of the mockers. And all of it in the naïve voice of the storyteller, with its sly undercurrent of ironic wit, through which one can follow the generational recurrence of the enormous Spinozan nose. The Elixir of Immortality is of this everlasting company, and given the dizzying two-thousand-year-old story of the Jews of Europe, how could it be otherwise? The remarkable Spinoza family line threads through a teeming procession of rabbis, sultans, siblings, philosophers, Inquisitors chronologies and geographies God and Torah and torments and pogroms history's famous (Rembrandt, Voltaire, Freud) and infamous (Torquemada, Hitler, Stalin) geniuses and rascals. In this realm of Eternal Tale dwells Sheherazade, and Don Quixote, and Chaucer and Bocaccio, masters of chronicles that seem to have no origin, so integral are they to the air we breathe. We name it Myth, or Folklore, and sometimes History but always and always it is Story. Words, in great order.' -Péter Esterházy 'Rarely - very rarely - a work is born into the world as if already old, as if inevitable, as if immemorially there. It's a rich book: there is joy, drama, passion, defeat, victory in it above all, words. It's the book of belonging and homelessness.

And the sun is also shining in it, thus it is also Southern European.

It's a very European book, not Hungarian, not Swedish, not Norwegian, not Spanish, but Central European, Eastern European, Western European. Collaboration, complicities and conflicts came to light in this highly appealing narrative of exile and estrangement, of essential humanness and its spiritual potential for creativity and resilience through time and space.'-Norman Manea, author of The Hooligan's Return 'This book could be called many things: The book of memory, the book of fictive facts, the book of family, the book of continuum, of fragments, the book of the Jews, that is, of Time. 'An ample and fascinating, semi-fictional European chronicle of the old-new Jewish story in a broad historical context. The Elixir of Immortality blends truth and fiction as it rewrites European history through comic, imaginative, scandalous, and tragic tales that prove -the only thing that can possibly give human beings immortality on this earth: our ability to remember. He chronicles the Spinozas' involvement in some of Europe's most formative cultural events with intertwining narratives that move through ages of tyranny, creativity, and social upheaval: into medieval Portugal, Grand inquisitor Torquemada's Spain, Rembrandt's Amsterdam, the French Revolution, Freud's Vienna, and the horrors of both world wars. Ari's two main sources of his family's history are a trunk of yellowing documents inherited from his grandfather, and his great-uncle Fernando's tales that captivated him when he was a child. From his deathbed, he begins his narrative, hoping to save his lineage from oblivion.

Now, after thirty-six generations, the last descendant of this long and illustrious chain, Ari Spinoza, doesn't have a son to whom to entrust the manuscript. A mesmerizing debut novel that spans a thousand years of European and Jewish history seen through the beguiling members of the Spinoza family Since the eleventh century, the Spinoza family has passed down, from father to son, a secret manuscript containing the recipe for immortality.