Book 25 : The Fixer - Bernard Malamud

With the possible exception of Night by Elie Wiesel, The Fixer is the most powerful and affecting book I've ever read.

It tells the story of a Jew living in Russia ~1920. The Fixer is a man who has grown up in the Jewish ghetto and moves into the city of Kiev in an attempt to make a better life for himself.

He gets a job and all is going well until he runs across a man who is passed out, drunk, in the street. After he helps him to his home, the grateful man offers him a well paying job in his warehouse. Though the Fixer knows that it's in an area of Kiev where Jews are not allowed, he accepts the job anyway.

Eventually he is arrested for living in a Jew-Free-Zone and subsequently is charged with the murder of a local boy. The majority of this book takes place in prison, where the fixer tries desperately to get access to a lawyer, to get an indictment or to just understand at all what the charges before him are.

He is poisoned. He is chained to a wall. He's beaten, he's sexually assaulted. Throughout it all, his captures promise to let him go if he will only admit that he killed the boy because 'the Jews' told him to. He is not a religious man, yet he refuses to pass on the blame.

This story was incredibly hard to read. Though it won the Pulitzer in 1967, there are some very clear parallels that can be drawn to Gitmo.

Overall, an outstanding and highly moving book.

9/10
YTD:
Books read : 25
Pages read : 7,535
Currently reading : Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut & The Pianist Who Loved Ayn Rand - Gene H. Bell-Villada