Rating: 
Summary: Absorbing and excellently crafted
Review: Reading Conspirators is a completely engrossing experience. It moves beautifully in and out of the characters' heads; the narrative achieves potent juxtapositions and parallels as it flies across rooms and across town, touching down in disparate consciousnesses. It's amazing how fully the author inhabits each of these minds, even when he's in them just for a moment. I completely understood even Maria-Luise. The metaphors in particular were stunning--and stunningly accurate! From the underpainting example in Goya from the first section of the book on, absolute precision. I always paused whenever a "we" appeared because it was at these moments that the author proceeded to make a profoundly astute observation on the way we all conduct our relationships. He put into words frustrations and hopes that I wasn't sure anyone else shared--and it's that level of recognition on the part of the reader that I think makes books important. And finally, what character portraits--I loved Asher (I laughed out loud during his fevered scene, though I laughed harder at the armor in the end) and even sympathized with Hans in the lovely coda.
Rating:
Summary: 21st century writing
Review: Spectacularly entertaining. Although it's perilously close to literature, this near post-modern fictional piece is one thing that most lettered novels aren't - fun to read. With a well researched backdrop of early 20th century Eastern Europe, its self-absorbed actors ignore global and interpersonal warning signs as they try to advance or hold onto their future.Finely crafted with vivid characters throughout (in particular Tausk and Wiladowski), the book weaves a disconcertingly realistic set of stories fixed in familiar themes - politics, sex, power, class, religion, and money - that dominate the lives of the several factions of conspirators who run in parallel throughout the tale. The foreshadowed ending is almost redolant with inevitability, but it retains poignancy due to the snowballing empathy and sympathy you've built up over the book's course. Entertaining and recommended reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Intent
Review: The book starts well and, like a star, gives some hope to a genre that has become somewhat burned out. However this star is short-lived. I soon felt the distinct feeling of being trapped in a room listening to a senile old man ramble on about some make-shift history lesson. A possibly superb notion has once again been twisted and corrupted by attention to unimportant detail and loss of focus. It's a shame, really.
Rating: 
Summary: Long winded and boooooring
Review: This book is excrucatingly long winded about nothing. The cover jacket sounded interesting - an exploration of early 20th century Austria, Jewish mysticism and shtetl life and revolutionary politics. Instead, it was a tedious, monotonous, never-ending exploration of the internal workings of characters I couldn't care less about. Paragraphs sometimes went on for 1-2 whole pages without any dialogue or action. It wasn't until the last 150 pages that ANYTHING actually happened. Prior to that the author simply told the reader what his characters were thinking and feeling. I found myself skimming the last 150 pages just to say I'd finished it. In the end, the actual events were meaningless and miniscule and most of the characters and their situations were left without resolution.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambitious But Not Entirely Successful
Review: This is an ambitious historical novel set in Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the eve of WWI. Bernstein attempts a combined social and psychological novel. Some reviewers refer to this as a 'modernist' work but its scope and intent seem closer to major 19th century novels. Conspirators features a host of characters and efforts to provide psychological description of all the major characters. Major themes are the fragmentation of life in this setting and a sense of alienation that grips all the characters, though in different ways. As commented by others, the focus of the novel is on Jewish life, and only one of the major characters is not a Jew.
The quality of writing is distinctly uneven. Many characters and scenes are delineated well. Others are repetitive and can be dull reading. The scenes, for example, involving the 'wonder rebbe' Moses Elch, are consistently interesting. Other scenes, like those involving the major non-Jewish character, Count Wiladowski, are repetitive. Overall, the effort to treat Jewish life in this community is sympathetic and interesting. In terms of the themes of fragmentation and alienation, I am not sure the book really hangs together, though this may be Bernstein's deliberate choice.
Despite these defects, there aren't a lot of recent novels with this serious intent and ambition. Bernstein may be a writer to watch.
Rating:
Summary: prize-worthy, dazzling book
Review: This novel transcends the ordinary and is utterly absorbing. The characters are wonderful and diverse and Bernstein treats them all with respect -- even the ones that are ridiculous or dangerous receive a careful and generous portrayal. The theme of terrorism and religious zealotry could hardly be more timely -- though part of the greatness of this novel is how it shows the radical impulses of another era without making the characters who longed for some expression of rebellion seem completely alien or ridiculous. The effects of having outgrown such impulses is one of the most fascinating feelings this novel repeatedly explores. Bernstein is masterful in his depiction of people's inner psyches, and the interplay between people's private lives and the workings of history is superbly handled. Wiladowski and Rotenburg (the older one) and Tausk are tour-de-force creations recalling Dostoyevsky and Machiavelli, and Brugger, the rabbi who thinks he might be the messiah, is bizarre and poignant and simply unparallelled. Bravo -- an amazing book. Highly recommended.
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