Seven years after his debut, the award-winning story collection “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” Nathan Englander has finally published a second book. nabokov novel His publisher must be relieved that it’s a novel. Even readers who end up not liking “The Ministry of Special Cases” ought at least to admire Englander’s good sense.
“The Ministry of Special Cases” is merely a wonderful medium-length novel, set in mid-1970s Buenos Aires during the “dirty war,” when Argentina’s military dictatorship “disappeared” tens of thousands of people, dissidents, suspected dissidents and citizens in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since much of the book’s power comes from its relentlessly unfolding plot, it’s not fair even to tell who disappears, let alone whether that person reappears.
But we can reveal that Englander ties together material nearly as heterogeneous as that hypothetical blockbuster he didn’t write. [Deep breath.] A defunct community of Jewish pimps and prostitutes, whose graves are walled off from the respectable part of the cemetery, and whose descendants want the very names (Talmud Harry, Shlomo the Pin) chiseled off the tombstones. nabokov novel A prostitute’s son who makes a living doing this. A nose job gone wrong. A nose job gone right. Burned books, a stolen baby, still-living people thrown out of airplanes, horrific tortures. And, most prominently, two people whose love and loyalty get tested beyond what they could have imagined—and pass that test in completely opposite ways.
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