Conspirators

Rating:
Summary: Told, Not Shown
Review: You have to admire M.A. Bernstein's chutzpah in flagrantly ignoring, on the first page and on every page thereafter, the prime directive of creative writing classes. "Show, don't tell": neophyte novelists hear this phrase ad nauseum. Don't describe what your characters are feeling; let readers discover your characters themselves, through apt description, dialogue, movement, and action. Bernstein's decision to flout this sacred text is perhaps the most breathtaking act of originality readers will find within these covers. Every moment of excitement in "Conspirators" -- and there are plenty -- is preceded and followed by layers and layers of flat-voiced exegesis. What nerve! What fine disdain for the conventions! What a concept!
... What a mistake. "Flat" is, at best, a euphemism for most of Bernstein's affectless prose. Much as one can, legitimately, accuse him of trying to channel Joseph Roth or Robert Musil, neither of those great writers would recognize themselves in Bernstein's monotonous reportorial style. It's impossible to know the reasons behind what I am sure was a deliberate decision on the author's part; it is possible to declare the result far from successful. . Despite this overwhelming artistic flaw, however, the plot-driven nature of "Conspirators" kept me reading it more or less obsessively to the end; I did care about what happened to his characters, and I did find their fates to be appropriate, and consistent with their actions in the book. That achievement, while significant, is one not unknown to solid commercial word-churners like Alan Furst and Dennis Lehane; in other words, it is not literary, and it is no guarantor of "art." Mr. Bernstein's place may well be among these lesser, although well-paid, lights.
Other reviewers have taken Bernstein to task for historical false notes. I too wondered about the probability of the von Arnsteins and von Alpsbachs acceding so readily to the revolutionary fervor of their (nominally) Jewish friend Hans Rotenburg; I also wondered at Rotenburg Senior's financial and personal omnipotence. Rotenburg Senior, a far more sympathetic character than his no-goodnik son, appears in Bernstein's telling to be so powerful as to appear almost inhuman; it's as if the author is unconsciously buying into the very stereotype one thinks, or hopes, he is trying to destroy.
Another problematic character is the nebbishy accountant, Asher Blumenthal. Blumenthal, a seething mass of erotic, financial, and other frustrations, is a genuine human being and as such tremendously appealing to the reader. We want to see him get rich, get laid, and get revenge on the snobs, Jewish and otherwise, who keep shoving him off to the side; we recognize, in Asher, a Jewish everyman; and even as we laugh at his impossibly mistaken conclusions about everything, we rejoice, because word is dropped very early in the text that Asher will wind up in "Palestine," and thus evade the greater horror of the Holocaust (foreshadowed, but not mentioned as such, in this book). Bernstein, however, sees Asher from the snob perspective, rendering him in the end into a Woody Allen stereotype of the whining, neurotic, physically weak Jew who remains clueless until the last page. This is disappointing and disheartening.
For a novel about Jews, there is very little Judaism in "Conspirators." The evil rebbe, Brugger, comes across like a secular cult leader of contemporary times. The grisly murders perpetuated (we are told) by his disciples have no basis in sense or nonsense; they seem to be gratuitous sensationalism thrown in almost after the fact, as if to "sex up" the book with blood'n'guts for those who like that sort of thing. Both ritual and faith are missing from this novel, and while that may reflect the assimilationist worldview of some characters, there is the perception of a spiritual void among the observant ones as well. There is more Judaism in one paragraph of any Singer novel -- and I refer particularly to Israel J. Singer's "The Brothers Ashkenazi," another obvious predecessor of "Conspirators," as well as to the more famous writings of his brother, Isaac Bashevis -- than in this entire tome. An educated non-Jew (think Thomas Kenneally) could have written this book. That could never be said of any Singer product, or of Joseph Roth's work for that matter, and JoRo was as assimilated as they come.
In short, if you like plot-driven exposition, and if you are not fussy about literary quality or style, if you enjoy the prospect of reading a long historical novel that does little to evoke the flavor of its times, if you look forward to spending days with characters who are never -- never -- described in any physical sense (so that you never know, for example, how tall or short these people are, or what their eyes or hair are like, or what their characteristic movements are apart from the cliched lighting of endless cigarettes), if you like reading about Jews who do not talk, act, think, or react like any Jews, fictional or otherwise, that you have ever met (Asher Blumenthal being the saving exception), then "Conspirators" may be your glass of tea.
Just be advised: it isn't art. It's fictional reporting.

Rating:
Summary: Finely crafted
Review: A detail oriented look at the class wars in a crumbling 1912-1913 European empire. Each sentence is finely crafted and characters are fully fleshed but neither, or both, good or bad, the cause and effect of life decisions made for themselves or to the detriment of others. Manipulative. A good read on a dark evening with tea for a portrait of Jewish relations pre-WWII.

Rating:
Summary: Dense, impressive peek into remote world
Review: A friend of a friend wrote this novel, which otherwise I probably would never have come across. I picked it up with no knowledge of what it was about and was amazed by how good it was. Not knowing anything about Galicia in the early 20th c., I can't say whether the book is historically accurate, but I can say that I was quickly sucked into the story. Essentially, the novel is about a bunch of human time bombs skulking erratically about this small city, and the reader waits with mounting anxiety to discover which of them goes off first and worst. What I most liked, though, were the characters, who seemed drawn for the most part with a shrewd, sardonic, and knowledgable eye. Some of the reviewers here apparently didn't like the way the author tunneled deep into these people, but I got a real kick out of it. This is the author's first novel; I hope he writes another.

Rating:
Summary: Life's too short...
Review: A thick literary soup of words, some of which make it through to the reader but most vanish into incomprehension. This book is a hard slog and, to my mind, not worth the effort.



Rating:
Summary: Both historical and anti-historical
Review: A very tedious read, indeed. The author has emersed himself in the history of this remote eastern province of the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the Great War, but he has got too many historical details wrong. He deals here only with the Jewish population and the small governmental elite, all of whom speak German, while the majority population of one kind of Slav or another is invisible. The plotting of a few Jews against the government is quite unlikely -- this is not Russia but Austria -- and the plotting of some aristocrats even less likely, since the German speaking aristocratic elite as well as the Polish-speaking aristocatic elite were loyal to the monarchy. Some of the inner frustrations of the various characters are indeed interesting but the overall impression is one of confusion and fantasy. The fact that the chief spy of the Governor, Jakob Tausk, may end up after the war as a Bolshevik Chekist is quite in keeping with his history and character. The Governor is perhaps the most interesting character -- a symbol of what was wrong with Austria as a feudal, Catholic absurdity surviving into the modern world.

Rating:
Summary: Both historical and anti-historical
Review: A very tedious read, indeed. The author has emersed himself in the history of this remote eastern province of the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the Great War, but he has got too many historical details wrong. He deals here only with the Jewish population and the small governmental elite, all of whom speak German, while the majority population of one kind of Slav or another is invisible. The plotting of a few Jews against the government is quite unlikely -- this is not Russia but Austria -- and the plotting of some aristocrats even less likely, since the German speaking aristocratic elite as well as the Polish-speaking aristocatic elite were loyal to the monarchy. Some of the inner frustrations of the various characters are indeed interesting but the overall impression is one of confusion and fantasy. The fact that the chief spy of the Governor, Jakob Tausk, may end up after the war as a Bolshevik Chekist is quite in keeping with his history and character. The Governor is perhaps the most interesting character -- a symbol of what was wrong with Austria as a feudal, Catholic absurdity surviving into the modern world.

Rating:
Summary: conspirators
Review: Engrossing. Characters move and intertwine through the story on an ever spiralling decent. The inevitable conclusion to this splendidly crafted novel takes one into a time foretelling the dismal period of war time Europe. The book explores a scociety of intensity and sometimes naive complexity. There is a pernicious but polite anti semitism invading the aristocratic world of the Count, a major personality unable to abide by the accepted behavior of his class, who never the less enjoys the late night conversations with his spy, a brilliant Jew who must watch his own back.
Delving into a period of chaos, the book is evocative and absorbing. Congratulations to Michael A. Bernstein.

Rating:
Summary: Not worth finishing :^(
Review: I agree with other reviewers that the author should learn how to better paragraph his work and speed up the action. I gave up after a few dozen pages which were more sporific than interesting. The author simply failed to capture my interest and make me want to finish. Sometimes, too much intellectualizing is counter-productive.

For me, the book never came to life.

Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Experience
Review: I found the book totally thrilling. It was impossible not to keep thinking of today's world of terrorists and spies while reading it. Somehow it creates an atmosphere that feels both really exciting and wickedly comic at the same time. Very dark and sexy too. It would make a great movie! Highest recommendation.

Rating:
Summary: Quite the slog...
Review: On several occasions I wanted to drag the editor into the parking and have him shot, but then realized that no editor could possible have touched this book and still retained his job. It's an almost painful read. That said, the plotting and character development are truly amazing. It's a wonderful psychological study into what motivates people; how people think they know what motivates others and how wrong they can be by making such assumptions. This is not a casual read. The writer slips from character to character, and thought to thought, often within the sample paragraph, which is easy since they tend to go on and on. You need to concentrate because a great deal is packed into those gargantuan paragraphs. The book is an absorbing look at the various movements that shaped pre-WWI European history and beyond: the attraction Communism held for the naïve rich and aristocratic; the Zionist movement which also appealed more to the rich than the poor, rising labor unrest and messianic (small m) Judaism. All of which were carefully monitored by a network of spies and informants controlled by those in power, some of whom who were very much afraid they wouldn't be in power for very much longer. I almost gave up on this book several times but stayed with it; not because there's a big payoff at the end (there's not) but because it's ultimately fascinating.