Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book nearly wore me out. Kabbalistic hair-splitting will do that. But, so will a three-hundred page paragraph. This is a literary tale written about Serbia, the Jewish community in Serbia and a non-Jew protagonist being the hope of that community. It is also about this same man being either the bait or the fish.
Our hero, a writer, is drawn into a never-ending short-lived story that has him not only going in circles, but also looking for meaning in those circles; even though sometimes a circle is just a circle. Sometimes. When someone knows what I am going to do before I do, how do I know that someone really did know that? Or, was that someone just playing with my mind by saying so? Or, by denying it?
Madness is highly overrated, I am told. But, what if I was lied to? And, is that what I want? No, I really want to know if I am doing something important for the side of good or if I am being used by the side of bad. I really, really want to know the truth. The problem is, I don't know who I'd believe was telling me the truth.
Albahari has the reader become a part of this segment of Serbian society in a very tough time. While he hasn't written an easily read book, it is a book that will play with your mind. Trying to unravel that which may not be meant to be unraveled can be fun. It is worth the effort.
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The place is Serbia, the time is the late 1990s. Our protagonist, a single man, writes a regular op-ed column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking pot and talking about sex, politics, and life in general. One day on the shore of the Danube he spots a man slapping a beautiful woman. Intrigued, he follows the woman into the tangled streets of the city until he loses sight of her. A few days later he receives a mysterious manuscript whose contents seem to mutate each time he opens it. To decipher the manuscript—a collection of fragments on the Kabbalah and the history of the Jews of Zemun and Belgrade—he contacts an old schoolmate, now an eccentric mathematician, and a group of men from the Jewish community. As the narrator delves deeper into arcane topics, he begins to see signs of anti-Semitism, past and present, throughout the city and he feels impelled to denounce it. But his increasingly passionate columns erupt in a scandal culminating in murder. Following in the footsteps of Foucault's Pendulum, Leeches is a cerebral adventure into the underground worlds of secret societies and conspiracy theories.
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