Gabi Gleichmann was born in Budapest in 1954 and raised in
Sweden. After studies in literature and philosophy, he worked as a
journalist and served as president of the Swedish PEN organization.
Gleichmann now lives in Oslo and works as a writer, publisher, and
literary critic. His first novel, The Elixir of Immortality, was
sold to eleven countries prior to its first publication.
Michael Meigs is an arts journalist and theatre reviewer in
Austin, Texas, who served more than thirty years as an economist
and diplomat with the U.S. Department of State. In 2011 the
American Scandinavian Foundation awarded him the annual ASF
Translation Prize for his English version of The Dean by Lars
Gustafsson.
-An ample and fascinating, semi-fictional European chronicle of the
old-new Jewish story in a broad historical context. 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. It's a very
European book, not Hungarian, not Swedish, not Norwegian, not
Spanish, but Central European, Eastern European, Western European.
And the sun is also shining in it, thus it is also Southern
European. It's the book of belonging and homelessness. It's a rich
book: there is joy, drama, passion, defeat, victory in it; above
all, words. Words, in great order.- --Peter Esterhazy
-Rarely -- very rarely -- a work is born into the world as if
already old, as if inevitable, as if immemorially there. We name it
Myth, or Folklore, and sometimes History; but always and always it
is Story. 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. 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. And all of it in the naive voice of the
storyteller, with its sly undercurrent of ironic wit, through which
one can follow the generational recurrence of the enormous Spinozan
nose. Not Gogol's nose, not Cyrano's, but the Shylockian nose of
endemic Jew-hatred, here laughingly magicked into mockery of the
mockers.
In its mammoth scope and aspiration, The Elixir of Immortality is
like no other contemporary novel. 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. Memorable
and sure to be one of the big novels of the season.- --Kirkus
Reviews (starred)
-Gleichmann here masterfully spins out the tangled fates of 17
generations of Spinozas...A supple translation of the Norwegian
original conveys the cathartic force of this masterpiece.-
--Booklist (Starred Review)
-If Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude took place in
cosmopolitan Europe, or if the cast of the Arabian Nights rubbed
shoulders with the greatest minds of Western civilization, then
those works might resemble this magical and tragic novel.- --Jewish
Book Council
-[An] imaginative and intriguing story...- --FlavorWire
-The Elixir of Immortality is an entertaining pan-European epic, an
extended family saga that will have you flipping back to the family
tree diagram at the front of the book while searching Wikipedia to
brush up on your European history...[A]n amusing panorama of
European history through the many eyes of one prodigious Jewish
family.- --The Rumpus
-A few novels are so thoroughly engrossing that one feels compelled
to reread them immediately...[C]ompellingly readable and lively for
some 800 pages. It's the kind of book that, wherever you open it,
you get hooked. Quite amazing for a first novel... [T]he simple
truth is that this beautiful narrative and its myriad tales
celebrates the age-old Jewish injunction: Zachor (remember). Few of
us know our family histories back more than a few generations:
Gleichmann offers us a world both real and imagined where we can
sense our selves as we might have been hundreds of years back. A
fabulous novel.- -Fuse
"An ample and fascinating, semi-fictional European chronicle of the
old-new Jewish story in a broad historical context. 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. It's a very
European book, not Hungarian, not Swedish, not Norwegian, not
Spanish, but Central European, Eastern European, Western European.
And the sun is also shining in it, thus it is also Southern
European. It's the book of belonging and homelessness. It's a rich
book: there is joy, drama, passion, defeat, victory in it; above
all, words. Words, in great order." --Peter Esterhazy
"Rarely -- very rarely -- a work is born into the world as if
already old, as if inevitable, as if immemorially there. We name it
Myth, or Folklore, and sometimes History; but always and always it
is Story. 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. 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. And all of it in the naive voice of the
storyteller, with its sly undercurrent of ironic wit, through which
one can follow the generational recurrence of the enormous Spinozan
nose. Not Gogol's nose, not Cyrano's, but the Shylockian nose of
endemic Jew-hatred, here laughingly magicked into mockery of the
mockers.
In its mammoth scope and aspiration, The Elixir of Immortality is
like no other contemporary novel. 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. Memorable
and sure to be one of the big novels of the season." --Kirkus
Reviews (starred)
"Gleichmann here masterfully spins out the tangled fates of 17
generations of Spinozas...A supple translation of the Norwegian
original conveys the cathartic force of this masterpiece."
--Booklist (Starred Review)
"If Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude took place in
cosmopolitan Europe, or if the cast of the Arabian Nights rubbed
shoulders with the greatest minds of Western civilization, then
those works might resemble this magical and tragic novel." --Jewish
Book Council
"[An] imaginative and intriguing story..." --FlavorWire
"The Elixir of Immortality is an entertaining pan-European epic, an
extended family saga that will have you flipping back to the family
tree diagram at the front of the book while searching Wikipedia to
brush up on your European history...[A]n amusing panorama of
European history through the many eyes of one prodigious Jewish
family." --The Rumpus
"A few novels are so thoroughly engrossing that one feels compelled
to reread them immediately...[C]ompellingly readable and lively for
some 800 pages. It's the kind of book that, wherever you open it,
you get hooked. Quite amazing for a first novel... [T]he simple
truth is that this beautiful narrative and its myriad tales
celebrates the age-old Jewish injunction: Zachor (remember). Few of
us know our family histories back more than a few generations:
Gleichmann offers us a world both real and imagined where we can
sense our selves as we might have been hundreds of years back. A
fabulous novel." -Fuse
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