Witz

January 25, 2010
An extravagant poeticism combined with an unbridled imagination burst from each considerable page of Cohen’s futuristic biblical opus (after A Heaven of Others
). Following his singular birth, Ben Israelien survives a peculiarly genocidal, apocalyptic plague, ends up the last Jew on the planet, and must contend with a new brand of religious fanaticism that hijacks the faith and perverts it into a form of Born-Again Judaism for overzealous converts. While these crusaders burn churches and transform roadhouses into synagogues, the secular Ben strives to escape his messiahlike status, eventually embarking on an odyssey across a kitchified, radicalized America in which his face adorns the new currency. A towering experiment, Cohen’s postmodern parable skewers the commodification of religion and decries a ballooning cultural bankruptcy, but navigating this doomsday picaresque’s nearly half-a-million words—many of them neologisms trapped inside labyrinthine, haphazardly punctuated sentences—is itself a taxing odyssey. Following in the tracks of James Joyce, Cohen strives to reinvent the English language, but the result is a kind of epic narrative poem that is only compelling in spurts.

June 15, 2010

Young writer Cohen (A Heaven of Others) has certainly outdone himself in this epic, a postapocalyptic whirlwind of a novel that features Benjamin Israelien, the world's final Jewish man. He's born full grown, bearded, and bespectacled into a world where Ellis Island is turned into a concentration camp. Despite the book's length, Cohen doesn't stop to elucidate the how's and whys of the catastrophes. Instead, we get geysers of paragraphs, often pages long and awash in a poetic fearlessness. The last line of each section is often either an unexpected joke or a poignant deferral from one of the many characters. Witz can in fact be translated as "joke," but the humor is of a tough kind. There are no footnotes, but the only real comparison is to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The punch lines may be off-putting to some readers, but the great lyrical sweeps of Cohen's writing must be applauded.

Verdict Readers who can handle the prodigious style (and consumptive length) of writers like Thomas Pynchon and William Vollmann can add Witz to their literary workout.--Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., Gainesville, FL

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