Conspirators

by Michael André Bernstein

Book Overview

"Beautifully written, intricate and entrancing."--Jaroslaw Anders, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the castle of a frontier town, on the border between Europe and the East, the corrupt Count-Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the empire, and his province. When a member of his own family is murdered, the count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jakob...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031242437X
• ISBN13: 9780312424374
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 506 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Great Fiction

Really good books reward close reading, and committed readers who crave superb contemporary fiction will find much to nourish them in the unfortunately neglected Conspirators. Those that invest their time and readerly gusto into the novel will discover an utterly absorbing vision. If the book is challenging at times, its composition is so strong and confident that we can rest assured that any difficulties are deliberate; Bernstein wants to make us question the how we make sense of history and of ourselves. We learn from the novel's Overture that before the onslaught of W.W.I there occurred an assassination in Galicia, a frontier town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Evident foreshadowing seems to occur in that we deduce who is very likely responsible - but not all conspiracies end the way we think they will, and human acts themselves are finally not reducible to mere cause and effect. When by the most circumstantial chain of events things turn out so differently, all of a sudden history's retrospective inevitability is severely shaken, for the past is felt to be something endlessly complex, every instant being an infinite divergence of possibilities. In Conspirators there is always a sense of how easy it could all be otherwise - a sense of possibility emerging out of the rich openness of life, and also out of the variousness inherent in human consciousness. Bernstein's characters are unusually lifelike; a result, I think, of their amazingly human capacity for cognition. They seem to think for themselves, rather than in the service of a novelistic plot. Instead of focusing on the life-story of a single protagonist there are several main characters, all irreducibly part of an historical era. It is through the subtle juxtapositioning of a diverse array of characters that the inhabitants of Galicia are related to us, with the result that their individuality is revealed along with their surprising similarities. Their minds are never quite graspable by each other, and when they miscalculate the motives or complexities of others they give away much more about their own. Bernstein's prose is at once intellectual and mystic, precise and erotic. These adjectives also accurately describe Brugger, a mysterious wonder rabbi who has seduced legions of followers with his prophetic exuberance. With this extraordinary character is the allure of absolute self-change - a breaking with the past that is the creation of a new self. His purpose is nothing less than the making of an inward will into an outer world. Antithetical to Brugger is the cynical Count Wiladowski, who achieves a striking pathos in his anxiety over the irrepressible change always occuring in himself, irrespective of his own will. He yearns to find a continuity of self, a harmony with his personal past, so that he can still have some faith in the integrity of his present thoughts and desires. Questions of how we relate to ourselves and to the surrounding world

Imposing Portrait of a Waning World

Vienna, 1925. In a newsstand the photo of a dangerous Soviet Ceka secret agent reported to be visiting Berlin with a Russian Delegation. A successful middle aged Jewish writer who believe to recognize in that image a former acquaintance of the times before the war. A sour impression that his life has been acted by someone else (this man?) and the attempt to cast light in a series of crimes happened just before the declaration of war. It is on the wings of these impressions we are invited in one of the most accomplished novels of these last years. A novel in the most classical and talented meaning of the word: an excellent piece of work, in a style remembering of Tolstoy and Joseph Roth, James and Zola, with a perfect blend of realism and surrealism. The Count Governor of a remote provincial city on the remotest edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ("on the edge of the unending Asian steppes"), a Jewish intellectual chief of his secret police, a dying Jewish multimillionaire and his rebel son, the young cadets of the landed aristocracy, a Jewish rabbi and his murderous community, the obscure all-pervading presence of anti-Semitism, a series of murders, a revolutionary plot, a bloodbath. This is a book I read with blissful pleasure, because of its ability to recreate a world, give substance to a imaginary geography, paint attitudes and character - but also for the subtle pervasive warping effect of memory, a light surreal mirror that blend of Kafka, Buzzati, Roth and sometimes freezes in the sharp gray-black images of Grosz, sometimes searches oblivion in the morbid light of an ancient black and with daguerreotype, The true pleasure of the book doesn't come from the force of the story and the descriptive ability of the writer, but by the contemplation of the human destiny, an all-pervading sadness but also a metaphysical pessimism in the possibility of human action. The Count governor obsessed by self preservation, the chief of the secret police by the meaning of Evil and Good, the Jewish rabbi fascinated by murder as confrontation with God, the young revolutionaries looking for an act of total auto-affirmation (revolutionary justice like they call it), the multimillionaire seemingly the only one to be master of his destiny, but the destiny of a dying man despairing of his only son. I cannot but warmly recommend this novel, with a single warning: this is not an easy book. Its main virtues rest on description and the blend of old European intellectualism, sometimes to detriment of action: so if you look for a easy to read spy or crime story, this is not the book for you. You are truly welcome if you can suggest other readings or just share ideas and comments! Thanks for reading.

Extraordinary and compelling

Conspirators might have been written by a 21st century Dostoevsky, especially in its portrayal of the frantic Asher Blumenthal. This remarkable novel skilfully presents the genesis of terrorist activity in Galicia as it moves from 1925 back to 1912-13. With a wealth of finely crafted historical detail, it vividly recreates the conflicts and passions of this era. This is a novel that will be relished by connoisseurs of great works of fiction.

21st century writing

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.

conspirators

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.