The Magician Of Lublin

The book tells the story of Yasha Mazur, the magician of Lublin, a small town in Poland. The story is gripping and is well-told. The writing is seamless. I couldn’t put the book down from the second chapter to the last page. What makes the book absorbing is the flow of the beautiful narrative that conveyed Yasha’s current state of mind, his career as performer, his marriage, his amorous relationships with three other women from different towns, the boredom he experienced despite all these, his search for meaning, and, finally, his penitence. The philosophical undertone of the novel lingers.

The book was written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. It was first published in 1960.

{June 11, 2009}