"God is the problem," says Snakes Hammurabi, explaining his crime. Arrested and imprisoned on a German prison barge for relieving himself upon a church altar, Snakes can find no one more responsible for his predicament than the Divine One himself. As he speaks, eleven hardened criminals including a cannibal, an assassin, and a Nazi listen to his story. Locked together by fate on the eve of the millennium, each has a story to tell. Each man, that is, but the silent one on the bottom bunk who never sleeps or eats--the mysterious Ben Alef.
When a violent storm rips the prison barge from its moorings and sets the prisoners adrift, these morally unbound men find themselves in real danger. But a series of remarkable events (dare one call them miracles?) deliver the escaped criminals to shore. Convinced that Ben Alef has saved them, they set out on foot, a small band of unlikely disciples attending their even more unlikely messiah.
Word spreads swiftly--and so does hysteria--as some people claim that Ben Alef is a fraud and some that he's deluded, while a daily growing rabble follows the procession with a deep need to believe, and does so.
In Signs and Wonders, Melvin Jules Bukiet dares to conjure the holiest event of our collective humanity with a viciously acute eye that spares no one. the new messiah must meet the press, the lawyers, the cops, and the swindlers, all of them vying for a piece of the action en route to the only place a modern Second Coming would occur--a theme park ruled by a rodent--as the celestial clock ticks down to '00.
Signs and Wonders is a singularly inventive book, set in full color on the world stage. Rife on the surface with Bukiet's trademark black humor and rage toward a malevolent God, it seethes below with incisive and courageous commentary on history, religious faith, and mankind at the end of this century of the Holocaust.
Genre: Literary Fiction
When a violent storm rips the prison barge from its moorings and sets the prisoners adrift, these morally unbound men find themselves in real danger. But a series of remarkable events (dare one call them miracles?) deliver the escaped criminals to shore. Convinced that Ben Alef has saved them, they set out on foot, a small band of unlikely disciples attending their even more unlikely messiah.
Word spreads swiftly--and so does hysteria--as some people claim that Ben Alef is a fraud and some that he's deluded, while a daily growing rabble follows the procession with a deep need to believe, and does so.
In Signs and Wonders, Melvin Jules Bukiet dares to conjure the holiest event of our collective humanity with a viciously acute eye that spares no one. the new messiah must meet the press, the lawyers, the cops, and the swindlers, all of them vying for a piece of the action en route to the only place a modern Second Coming would occur--a theme park ruled by a rodent--as the celestial clock ticks down to '00.
Signs and Wonders is a singularly inventive book, set in full color on the world stage. Rife on the surface with Bukiet's trademark black humor and rage toward a malevolent God, it seethes below with incisive and courageous commentary on history, religious faith, and mankind at the end of this century of the Holocaust.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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