The Fixer
A Novel
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ISBN10: 0374529388
ISBN13: 9780374529383
Trade Paperback
352 Pages
$19.00
CA$25.00
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel, and one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.
Set in Tsarist Russia during a period of virulent anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. At the outset, Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, he finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found dead in a cave, drained of nearly all his blood, the Jews are accused of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. Malamud said of the book: "Whatever else it had to be about, it had to be about how the idea of freedom grows in the mind of a man subjected to a grave injustice." The Fixer dramatizes a particular kind of injustice, and the result is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction.
Reviews
Praise for The Fixer
"When I finished reading this novel, I felt castigated and inspired. Grumbling about the state of the world suddenly wasn't enough. And excusing myself from political activity felt wrong. In light of this book, my inaction felt immoral. While The Fixer isn't a book about morality, it is a moral book. That is, rather than offering a flimsy directive, it presents the reader with a forceful question: Why aren't you doing anything."—Jonathan Safran Foer, from the Introduction
"A literary event in any season."—Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times
"Brilliant [and] harrowing . . . Historical reality combined with fictional skill and beauty of a high order make [it] a novel of startling importance."—Elizabeth Hardwick
"The Fixer deserves to rank alongside the great Jewish-American novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."—The Independent (London)
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
The Fixer
I
From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction. Vey iz mir, he thought...
About the author
Bernard Malamud; Introduction by Jonathan Safran Foer
