Book Reviews
Beautifully written, The Ministry of Special Cases nonetheless presents a conundrum. Englander does in fiction what his absent God cannot: create a world. And then he peoples that world with characters that he treats better than history ever would. Such decency is not a large failing in a young novelist. If only the junta had been half so kind.
Will Blythe - New York Times Book Review
A mesmerizing rumination on loss and memory.... It's a family drama layered with agonized and often comical filial connections that are stretched to the snapping point by terrible circumstance...builds with breathtaking, perfectly wrought pacing and calm, terrifying logic.
Los Angeles Times
A tour-de-force....A few pages into The Ministry of Special Cases, it becomes clear how much [Englander] has to bring to the topic: pitch-black humor, a skeptical affection for his characters, and the narrative ability to trace the impact of fascism-with-a-modern-face on a cluster of lives.
Seattle Times
Wonderful.... Since much of the book’s power comes from its relentlessly unfolding plot, it’s not fair even to tell who disappears, let alone whether that person reappears.... Englander maintains an undertone of quirky comedy almost to the end of his country.
Newsweek
Englander's prose moves along with a tempered ferocity — simple yet deceptively incisive.... Englander’s book isn’t so much about the search for a lost boy. It’s about fathers and sons and mothers and faith and community and war and hope and shame. Yes, that’s a lot to pack into 339 pages. But not when a book reads at times with the urgency of a thriller.
Esquire
Resonates of Singer, yes, but also of Bernard Malamud and Lewis Carroll, plus the Kafka who wrote The Trial.... You will wonder how a novel about parents looking for and failing to find their lost son, about a machinery of state determined to abolish not only the future but also the past, can be horrifying and funny at the same time. Somehow...this one is.
Harper's
(Audio version.) Morey's dulcet theatrical tones offset the messy lives of the characters in Englander's first novel about Jewish residents of 1970s Buenos Aires who live in fear of Argentina's vicious military dictatorship. Against the backdrop of the dirty war conducted against leftists and activists, Kaddish Poznan scratches together a living vandalizing the gravestones of Jewish criminals who are embarrassments to their families, even in eternal slumber. Morey struggles manfully with the book's religious terminology and outbursts of Spanish, but his reading is too mannered to render the vibrancy of Englander's prose. His pauses are often too long, and his line readings sometimes lean awkwardly, and puzzlingly, on certain words. Nonetheless, Morey's professional assurance means that, certain flaws notwithstanding, his reading flows along without overly noticeable interruption, accurately conveying the menace lurking behind every word, every sentence of Englander's death-haunted tale.
Publishers Weekly
Kaddish Poznan, who's been scraping along at the edge of society, suddenly finds himself in the middle of Argentina's infamous Dirty War when his son disappears. We've waited many years for Englander to follow up his remarkable story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, with a first novel.
Library Journal
This is a staggeringly mature work, gracefully and knowledgeably set in a milieu far from the author’s native New York.... Four p’s best describe this work: poignant, powerful, political, and yet personal.
Booklist
The fate of Argentina's Jews during the 1976-83 "Dirty War" is depicted with blistering emotional intensity in this stark first novel from the author of the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999). Englander focuses tightly on the family of Kaddish Poznan, who scrapes together a living by obliterating despised surnames (those of "the famous Jewish pimps of Buenos Aires . . . [and] their . . . whores") from gravestones in a cemetery unvisited by their scandalized relatives. This earns him little respect from his wife, Lillian, who works for a life-insurance firm, and their 19-year-old son Pablo (nicknamed "Pato"), a university student whose political idealism estranges him from his parents' strategies for survival, as their country's ruling junta hunts down "undesirables" and innocent citizens swell the ranks of "the disappeared." A context of uncertainty and terror is gradually defined: Lillian invests in a steel door for their apartment; Kaddish trades his services to a plastic surgeon for rhinoplasties that may make him and Lillian look "less Jewish"; and the precautionary burning of their son's books in the family's bathtub sends Pato angrily away from them and into the clutches of their oppressors. Englander's perfectly engineered plot then takes the distraught parents into the belly of the beast as they importune the police and the eponymous Ministry (a Kafkaesque nightmare of doubletalk and indifferent brutality). They have a chilling confrontation with a prosperous general and his heartless wife and more despairing encounters with a phlegmatic relief worker, a priest who can do good only by circumventing moral action and a self-described "monster" who survives by performing the dirty war's dirtiest deeds. One stunning twist discloses Pato's fate in a way neither parent will ever accept, and the novel climaxes where it began, in a cemetery, where Kaddish hopes, against hope, to beat the murderers at their own game. A political novel anchored, unforgettably, in the realm of the personal. Englander's story collection promised a brilliant future, and that promise is here fulfilled beyond all expectations.
Kirkus Reviews