A review by jaclyncrupi
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

4.0

Last week Joshua Cohen went and won the @pulitzerprizes for fiction with a book I had not heard of. The last book of his I read was Book of Numbers. Anyway all that is to say this was surprising. The Pulitzer is probably my favourite prize. The Netanyahus tells the comic account of Harold Bloom, reborn here as Ruben Blum, hosting Benzion Netanyahu (father of Benjamin) as he interviews for a university academic position. Cohen had heard about this from Bloom himself and transformed it into inventive and bold fiction. So much about this book should not work and yet against all odds it does. There is so much here about Jewish identity and politics that I’m sure I missed some of it but feel like I still learnt a lot. Cohen is an unmatched prose stylist and I delighted in his stylistic acrobatics. This is not the kind of book you love, it’s the kind of book you admire and appreciate. Cohen’s intelligence is impressive and his ironic and droll reimagining of this moment in time is something to behold.