The Ministry of Special Cases
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

Nathan Englander. (2009). The Ministry of Special Cases. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nathan Englander. 2009. The Ministry of Special Cases. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.

Nathan Englander. The Ministry of Special Cases. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.

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1. • value: Jewish
2. • value: literary fiction
3. • value: Historical
4. • value: Humor
5. • value: historical novel
6. • value: Fiction
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8. • value: Religion
9. • value: satire
10. • value: Comedy
11. • value: Historical Fiction
12. • value: Argentina
13. • value: literature
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15. • value: Jewish literature
16. • value: fiction books
17. • value: funny books
18. • value: Jewish books
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20. • value: humor books
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29. • value: argentina book
30. • value: argentina novel
31. • value: award winning books for adults
32. • value: novels for women best sellers

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Englander, Nathan
   • bioText:

     Nathan Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.

   • name: Nathan Englander

imprint

Vintage

publishDate

2009-11-18T00:00:00-05:00

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title

The Ministry of Special Cases

fullDescription

From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, the debut novel from the Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges casts a powerful spell.
In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Seattle Times
   • content:

     "Who is this Nathan Englander, so young in novelist years, but already possessed of an old masters voice?... One reads this novel in awe of Englander's talent. --The New York Times Book Review"A mesmerizing rumination on loss and memory." --Los Angeles Times"[A] tour-de-force.... A few pages into The Ministry of Special Cases, it becomes clear how much [Englander] has to bring to the topic: pitch-black humor, a skeptical affection for his characters, and the narrative ability to trace the impact of fascism-with-a-modern-face on a cluster of lives."

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 19, 2007
     
     
     Reviewed by
     Allegra Goodman
     Young writers are often told to write about what they know. In his 1999 collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
     , Nathan Englander spun the material of his orthodox Jewish background into marvelous fiction. But the real trick to writing about what you know is to make sure you know more as you mature. Englander's first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases
     , conjures a world far removed from "The Gilgul of Second Avenue." The novel is set in 1976 in Buenos Aires during Argentina's "dirty war." Kaddish Poznan, hijo de puta
     , son of a whore, earns a meager living defacing gravestones of Jewish whores and pimps whose more respectable children want to erase their immigrant parents' names and forget their shameful activities. Kaddish labors in the Jewish cemetery at night. His hardworking wife, Lillian, toils in an insurance agency by day, and their idealistic son, Pato, attends college, goes to concerts and smokes pot with his friends. When Pato is taken from home, Kaddish learns what it really means to erase identity, because no one in authority will admit Pato has been arrested. No one will even acknowledge that Pato existed. As Lillian and Kaddish attempt to penetrate the Ministry of Special Cases, Englander's novel takes on an epic quality in which Jewish parents descend into the underworld and journey through circles of hell.
     Gogol, I.B. Singer and Orwell all come to mind, but Englander's book is unique in its layering of Jewish tradition and totalitarian obliteration. At times Englander's motifs seem forced. Kaddish, whose very name evokes the memory of the dead, chisels out the name of a plastic surgeon's disreputable father, and in lieu of cash receives nose jobs for himself and his wife. Lillian's nose job is at first unsuccessful, and her nose slides off her face. One form of defacement pays for another. Kaddish fights with his son in the cemetery and accidentally slices off the tip of Pato's finger. Attempting to erase a letter, Kaddish blights a digit. But the fight seems staged, Pato's presence unwarranted except for Englander's schema. Other scenes are haunting: Lillian confronting bureaucrats; Kaddish appealing to a rabbi to learn if it is possible for a Jew to have a funeral without a body; Kaddish picking an embarrassing embroidered name off the velvet curtain in front of the ark in the synagogue. When he picks off the gold thread, the name stands out even more prominently because the velvet underneath the embroidery is unfaded, darker than the rest of the fabric. Englander writes with increasing power and authority in the second half of his book; he probes deeper and deeper, looking at what absence means, reading the shadow letters on history's curtain. (May)
     
     Allegra Goodman is the author of five books, including
     Intuition.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 28, 2007
     Morey’s dulcet theatrical tones offset the messy lives of the characters in Englander’s first novel about Jewish residents of 1970s Buenos Aires who live in fear of Argentina’s vicious military dictatorship. Against the backdrop of the dirty war conducted against leftists and activists, Kaddish Poznan scratches together a living vandalizing the gravestones of Jewish criminals who are embarrassments to their families, even in eternal slumber. Morey struggles manfully with the book’s religious terminology and outbursts of Spanish, but his reading is too mannered to render the vibrancy of Englander’s prose. His pauses are often too long, and his line readings sometimes lean awkwardly, and puzzlingly, on certain words. Nonetheless, Morey’s professional assurance means that, certain flaws notwithstanding, his reading flows along without overly noticeable interruption, accurately conveying the menace lurking behind every word, every sentence of Englander’s death-haunted tale. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 19).

popularity

138

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shortDescription

From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, the debut novel from the Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges casts a powerful spell.
In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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   • description: Fiction / Humorous / General
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