The Elixir of Immortality

"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 naïve 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 novel done right, full of wit and mystery. Memorable and sure to be one of the big novels of the season."—Kirkus (Starred Review)
"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.” —Péter Esterházy