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A review by gerhard
The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon
5.0
This comedic novel is also incredibly sad. Melancholy seeps through these pages. Make no mistake though, it is uproariously funny: but only, I suppose, if you like your sacred cows (or in this case, cats) served rare.
Aleksandar Hemon goes out of his way to poke fun at as many cultural, social, religious, racial, sexual, gender and political sensitivities as he can in the brief span of a few hundred pages. All this is jerry-rigged to a highly farcical plot that builds up (I think ‘crescendos’ is a better word) to a couple of outrageous setpieces starring cats called Bushy and Dolly, a Samurai sword, a deranged Iraqi war vet and an equally deranged Serbian.
I was surprised to find out that the main protagonist, Joshua Levin, is actually in his 30s, because he acts like a dissipated, perpetually horny teenager – with the same attention span and shallow grasp of himself and reality, not to mention a rather tenuous grasp on his own heritage.
And Jewishness. A lot of the book’s funniest moments occur when Josh engages with Bernie, a prototypical mensch. One conversation has Bernie debating the lack of religious faith as the main cause of a zombie’s insatiable appetite, when Josh tells him about his latest movie script conflating two of America’s favourite obsessions, zombies and war.
An English language teacher in his day job, Josh nevertheless has far bigger aspirations of making it big in Hollywood with one of his perpetually mutating movie scripts, which is where the title of the novel comes from, in case you were wondering.
Sections of this putative masterwork are sectioned throughout the novel in all their painful glory; the reader quickly takes these for granted, until a particular narrative sleight of hand right at the end, which is just simply gobsmackingly brilliant.
Initially I had reservations about this, because it reminded me too much of a failed hybrid of Portnoy’s Complaint and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But stick with it; you’ll quickly be appalled at far Hemon can take this.
Despite being thoroughly dissolute and nihilistic, the reader is surprised to discover that Josh is a fanboy of Baruch Spinoza. Now I take my proverbial hat off to any writer with the balls to combine Ethics and zombies. And to have such riotous fun while doing so.
Aleksandar Hemon goes out of his way to poke fun at as many cultural, social, religious, racial, sexual, gender and political sensitivities as he can in the brief span of a few hundred pages. All this is jerry-rigged to a highly farcical plot that builds up (I think ‘crescendos’ is a better word) to a couple of outrageous setpieces starring cats called Bushy and Dolly, a Samurai sword, a deranged Iraqi war vet and an equally deranged Serbian.
I was surprised to find out that the main protagonist, Joshua Levin, is actually in his 30s, because he acts like a dissipated, perpetually horny teenager – with the same attention span and shallow grasp of himself and reality, not to mention a rather tenuous grasp on his own heritage.
And Jewishness. A lot of the book’s funniest moments occur when Josh engages with Bernie, a prototypical mensch. One conversation has Bernie debating the lack of religious faith as the main cause of a zombie’s insatiable appetite, when Josh tells him about his latest movie script conflating two of America’s favourite obsessions, zombies and war.
An English language teacher in his day job, Josh nevertheless has far bigger aspirations of making it big in Hollywood with one of his perpetually mutating movie scripts, which is where the title of the novel comes from, in case you were wondering.
Sections of this putative masterwork are sectioned throughout the novel in all their painful glory; the reader quickly takes these for granted, until a particular narrative sleight of hand right at the end, which is just simply gobsmackingly brilliant.
Initially I had reservations about this, because it reminded me too much of a failed hybrid of Portnoy’s Complaint and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But stick with it; you’ll quickly be appalled at far Hemon can take this.
Despite being thoroughly dissolute and nihilistic, the reader is surprised to discover that Josh is a fanboy of Baruch Spinoza. Now I take my proverbial hat off to any writer with the balls to combine Ethics and zombies. And to have such riotous fun while doing so.