[In the following review, Gross offers a positive assessment of Benjamin's Crossing, despite what he asserts are its inaccuracies concerning Marxist thought.]

Benjamin’s Crossing is identified on the title page as a novel. And that it is. It also has as its main character a real person, who can lay claim to being the most original and important thinker of the twentieth century. Jay Parini’s novel is quite good, but would probably not get much notice were it not about Walter Benjamin. As a book “about” Benjamin it has both its moments and its problems.

During the last years of his life, in the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin lived in Paris, spending most of his time at the Bibliothèque Nationale, working on his great unfinished book on the Paris Arcades. As the Nazis threatened the French capital and the extent of the Fascist catastrophe became undeniable, especially for Jews, Benjamin left Paris, first for Marseilles and, finally, crossing the Pyrenees on foot to Spain, only to be turned back by the police in the first Spanish village he came to. Already very ill with heart disease, and harboring no illusions as to his fate were he to reenter occupied France, he almost certainly committed suicide in that village on 25 September 1940.

Parini’s novel follows what is known of Benjamin’s last months and days quite accurately. And in a series of flashbacks narrated by important people in Benjamin’s life, the author invents scenes in Paris, Moscow, Berlin, and elsewhere during the 1920s and 1930s, which for the most part ring true with regard to Benjamin’s ideas and opinions, his relationships, and the important events of his life.

The novel rarely comes fully to life, despite Parini’s efforts to people it with interesting characters, both “real” and fictional. An exception to this is the series of scenes involving Benjamin and José, the teenage son of Henny Gurland, the fellow refugees who accompanied him on the difficult walk through the Pyrenees during his last days. One of the best statements Parini attributes to Benjamin himself is one which José remembers in the days following Benjamin’s death: “He could hear that low voice, guttural, keyed and pitched like no other. ‘The world is a dark place,’ he was saying. ‘It is always in disrepair. But we—you and I, José—we have a little chance, an opportunity. If we try very, very hard, we can imagine goodness. We can think of ways to repair the damage, piece by piece.’”

As a “novel of ideas,” Benjamin’s Crossing is weakest in those passages which deal with Marxism, especially the ideas of Bertolt Brecht. It is simplistic to assert as “the basic Marxist presupposition,” “that economics rules the world.” It is just not quite right to say of Benjamin, “He was no Marxist.” Certainly not only a Marxist, but in meaningful ways, very much the most brilliant Marxist thinker of our time. And to interpret Brecht’s notion of plumpes Denken—his injunction that we “think crudely”—to mean that “all useful thought must be simple, crystalline, and fresh” seems to miss the point. Brecht’s “Eats first, morals after” from The Threepenny Opera is more like what he had in mind.

On the other hand, Parini’s summary descriptions of the Arcades project, of Benjamin’s ideas on language and on history, are quite accurate and interesting accounts of very important, very difficult conceptions. For someone already interested in Benjamin, the book is fascinating, whatever our quibbles. If it attracts to Benjamin’s writings readers who might otherwise never have found their way there, it will have accomplished a worthy service.