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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