Benjamin's Crossing

In a formidable display of intellectual and imaginative sympathy, Parini (The Last Station, etc.) novelizes the life and death of Walter Benjamin, one of the major literary and cultural critics of the 20th century. A German Jew whose circle of friends (Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt and Bertolt Brecht among them) reads like a roll call of the great European minds of his era, Benjamin committed suicide in Spain shortly after crossing the Pyrennees in flight from the Nazi occupation of France. Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism who narrates much of the novel, sums up Benjamin well. Lamenting his friend's death, he says: ""The European mind has lost its champion, its dauphin, its sweetest prince."" On the other hand, Scholem notes that his friend was ""an ignoramus when it came to politics."" Indeed, the Benjamin that appears in these pages is deeply flawed, narcissistic and detached. Parini paints a portrait of the intellectual as a (brilliant) egoist who can't see the forest for the trees. Settling in Paris with his sister in the wake of Hitler's rise to power, Benjamin, despite his obsession with history in the abstract, is unable to face the reality of Europe's descent into barbarism. Parini intercuts his own translations of some of Benjamin's writings with passages written from the point of view of others, including Scholem and Lisa Fittko, another displaced German leftist, who leads Benjamin from France into Spain. Parini, himself an accomplished critic as well as a novelist and poet, is able both to expose the blind spots of the highbrow European mind, which is easy, and to dramatize and summarize highbrow ideas, which is difficult. His novel is not so much a tragedy as it is a eulogy--not just for Walter Benjamin, but for an entire cosmopolitan European intellectual tradition. (May)