Quit Listening To: "The Ministry of Special Cases" by Nathan Englander

Quit Listening To: The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander, downloaded from Overdrive.

Just not that good. This received plenty of good reviews but was lame. I listened to about 30 or 45 minutes and bailed.

Main character, whose name I do not recall, is the son of a Jewish whore in Buenos Aires. His mother and other undesirables, pimps and loansharks, are buried on the "bad" side of the Jewish cemetery. Son-of-a-whore (hijo de puta) is hired by the now respectable children of those pimps and whores to climb the wall separating the bad side from good side and chisel away the names on the gravestones. Today's respectable progeny want to erase their link to yesterday's scum.

Meanwhile Son-of-a-whore's wife is buying some security door and his university enrolled son doesn't like his father. My thought on this? Who the fuck cares?

EDIT, February 3rd: I received my copy of COGNOTES highlights in the mail and Englander received the Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. Either the rest of this years selection of Jewish literature was horrendous or none of the judges read the winning book.