The Netanyahus Synopsis
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian-but not an historian of the Jews-is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies.
Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics - An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
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Joshua Cohen Press Reviews
'Joshua Cohen is such an accomplished writer it's surprising he isn't a better known one.... Cohen's new book - his sixth - continues the turn to allegorical realism [and] is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I've read in ages.' - Jon Day, Financial Times
'The Netanyahus is Cohen's sixth novel, his most conventional and his best to date. It is a tour de force: compact, laugh-out-loud funny, the best new novel I've read this year [and] probably the funniest novel ever written about contending historiographies.... Cohen's lesson, in this determinedly comic novel, is that history happens as farce and tragedy simultaneously.' - John Phipps, The Times
'[Cohen] clearly is a genius ... The Netanyahus [is] a comic historical fantasia - a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression.... With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth's The Ghost Writer and Nabokov's Pale Fire.... This is a brisk, impudent, utterly immersive novel.' - Leo Robson, Guardian
'The Netanyahus, like Cohen's previous novels, is driven by the momentum of its prose. It has a freewheeling, all-consuming style which frequently turns up unexpected delights.... This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments' - Christopher Shrimpton, Spectator
'No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus - an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed - crackles with Cohen's high style and joyride intelligence.' - Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark
'The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.' - Colm Toibin, author of The Magician
'Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious in American fiction today.' - James Wood, New Yorker
