The Fixer is the winner of the 1967 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The Fixer (19... read full description
The Fixer (19... read full description
reviews
Jul 14, 2007
Elizabeth
rated it: 
A huge disappointment as I’d briefly christened Malamud My Favorite Author after having recently read The Assistant and several short stories (“The Angel Levine”!). This is the book that won Malamud the Nobel, and I had to wonder why. It’s ideological, heavy handed, a hammer on your skull, bald-faced allegory, and miserable to read, pages and pages of suffering. I know there’s a grand point here, and it has something to do with the philosophy of Spinoza (which I haven’t read), God’s betrayal of
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Oct 29, 2011
William
rated it: 
After reading over a hundred pages in Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, which is in large part about the horrid pogroms unleashed on Europe's Jews in the Middle Ages, I thought The Fixer would be a compatible co-read. The novel is set in Russia between the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1905) and the start of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917). The Fixer tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jew dwelling in a Russian shtetl 30 versts from Kiev who tries to work as a general handyman, a fixer.
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(2 people liked it)
Dec 17, 2008
Evan
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Jun 18, 2008
Mara
rated it:
What a difficult book to read, and, I can only imagine, to write. We start with the injustice of poverty and lack of opportunity in the shtetl and move almost directly into a variety of unjust accusations leveled against Yakov Bok, who has become a scapegoat for all the imagined evil deeds of all the Jews in Russia.
Bok leaves the shtetl with hopes of a better life in Kiev. At first, things look up for him. Serendipity finds him a good job, and he is able to afford some books, and eve More...
Bok leaves the shtetl with hopes of a better life in Kiev. At first, things look up for him. Serendipity finds him a good job, and he is able to afford some books, and eve More...
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Feb 12, 2009
Vasare
rated it: 
one of my least favorite books ever
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Nov 06, 2011
Karen
rated it:
La lectura de este relato es solo para quienes tiene el coraje de soportar la crudeza, de sentir y de ver ante uno lo que fue el sufrimiento de muchos. El protagonista, "un reparador" que lejanamente logra ir mejorando el estado de las cosas, va en caída, los lectores nos damos cuenta de ello y él no.
Hubo algunas partes que se hicieron lentas, sobre todo al final del relato, por eso no le puse la quinta estrella.
Otro rasgo que me disgustó fue que en momentos era demasiado More...
Hubo algunas partes que se hicieron lentas, sobre todo al final del relato, por eso no le puse la quinta estrella.
Otro rasgo que me disgustó fue que en momentos era demasiado More...
Oct 11, 2011
Josh
rated it: 
There are a lot of great books where reading them feels like having your frontal lobe beaten. After reading a good chunk of a book like this, there's a discomfort in your jaw because you had it clenched the whole time. The Fixer was one of these books but I don't mean that as a criticism. It requires work, like a lot of worthwhile art. I prefer books that offer a pleasurable sensation--enlightenment in some non-cerebral way--but sometimes you just need to read through concrete. So. I read this t
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Aug 28, 2010
Agnes
rated it:
With the possible exception of Night by Elie Wiesel, The Fixer is the most powerful and affecting book I've ever read.
It tells the story of a Jew living in Russia ~1920. The Fixer is a man who has grown up in the Jewish ghetto and moves into the city of Kiev in an attempt to make a better life for himself.
He gets a job and all is going well until he runs across a man who is passed out, drunk, in the street. After he helps him to his home, the grateful man offers him a wel More...
It tells the story of a Jew living in Russia ~1920. The Fixer is a man who has grown up in the Jewish ghetto and moves into the city of Kiev in an attempt to make a better life for himself.
He gets a job and all is going well until he runs across a man who is passed out, drunk, in the street. After he helps him to his home, the grateful man offers him a wel More...
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Jan 03, 2010
Nate's
rated it:
This was a hard one for me to get through. It's been a while since I've read a Russian author, mostly because I remember the cloudy viscous feeling I get whenever I read a story so thick with the horrible things people do to one another. This book reminded me of Tolstoy and Nabakov a little. Bernard Malamud, the author, is american, but the story takes place in the Ukraine just before the first world war. Yakov Bok is a poor small town handyman who gets caught up in a huge political maelstrom af
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Sep 20, 2011
Cruton
rated it:
The story of Yakov Bok, a Russian peasant Jew from the country. After his wife is unable to conceive children they drift apart she runs away and after puttering around their village for a while longer Yakov decides that he has never had anything in this village so why is he bothering to stay? He packs up his meager belongings and moves to Kiev, saving a man passed out drunk face down in the snow. The man is a member of the Black Hundreds (an anti-Semitic group) but Yakov saves him anyway. Gettin
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Jan 07, 2012
Andi
rated it:
I had never heard of this award-winning 1966 classic, but I picked up The Fixer from my favourite bookstore, BMV, on the basis of Jonathan Safron Foer's forward. Once again, Foer got it right: The Fixer did not disappoint. It was a powerful, albeit difficult book to read.
The Fixer is the story of a poor Jewish handyman in Tzarist Russia who is framed for the murder of a Christian child. He is jailed awaiting trial, and subjected to the most gruesome and humiliating conditions imagin More...
The Fixer is the story of a poor Jewish handyman in Tzarist Russia who is framed for the murder of a Christian child. He is jailed awaiting trial, and subjected to the most gruesome and humiliating conditions imagin More...
Mar 25, 2011
Khris
rated it:
I'd never heard of this book and not sure I would've ever chosen to read it on my own but it was the March pick for our Pulitzer Prize book club. Amazingly, it is based on a true story, set in the Ukraine in the early 1900s. Yakov Bok, a carpenter, or "fixer," leaves his shtetl in search of a better life after his wife runs off with another man. He is Jewish by origin but has never been a religious man. He's chosen to stay away from religion and politics and has mostly kept to him
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Jun 01, 2009
Sara
rated it:
I bought this book in college and it's been sitting on my shelf unopened until last week. This novel was written well, and it was based on a true incident where a Jewish man was tried and convicted of murdering a Russian boy who was actually killed by his own mother. It was set in Russia during the reign of the last zsar (1905-ish), at a time of intense anti-semitic hatred--it reminded me of Fiddler on the Roof, but I haven't checked to see if it's the same time. Yakov is an ironic Christ figure
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Feb 16, 2012
Ted
rated it:
The is a Pulitzer prize winning novel. I found it a very depressing read. It tells a story that, in its historical setting, is believable. The main character is a victim of circumstances, for which we feel sympathy, and even horror when we reflect on the fate that befalls men. But he is not actually very likable. All of these things are good, or at worst, not bad.
I just skimmed through the last 60 pages of the book, perhaps I will change my mind about it at some point. But fo More...
I just skimmed through the last 60 pages of the book, perhaps I will change my mind about it at some point. But fo More...
Apr 08, 2011
Nathaniel
rated it:
The Fixer is probably my all-time favorite novel. It is best described by the adjective "powerful." I read it as part of a college course, in 1995, and to this day there's hardly a week in which I don't think of it. Malamud brilliantly uses the real-life case of Mendel Beilis, falsely accused of the anti-Semitic blood libel in 1911 or 1912 in Russia, as a historical backdrop. Beilis is replaced by a flawed but idealistic man named Yaakov Bok, a Jew with a tenuous connection to Judaism.
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Oct 30, 2010
Renee
rated it:
Brilliant and harrowing . . . Historical reality combined with fictional skill, all this and yet so painful to read at times, I found myself glossing over words and sentences.
The book center's around handyman ("the fixer") Yakov Bok's inner struggle with himself as with the enormous injustice of Kiev, and the pure evil and prejudice of local officials who are looking for a Jewish scapegoat to make an example of by his false imprisonment.
At the end of the novel More...
Oct 22, 2009
Matt
rated it: 
This should be required reading for... someone. Perhaps all the taxpayers shoving punishment, prisons, punishment, prisons down the world's throat. For depicting an imprisonment in detail, letting time affect the narrative as it affects the character, and accomplishing that in an interesting way, The Fixer is pretty impressive. And every three or so pages there is a sentence that keeps you reading, a little zing. Otherwise, the book wasn't like trudging uphill, but it wasn't like the momentum
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Aug 25, 2011
KW in CT
rated it:
I read this book as part of my Pulitzer project. It is about a falsely accused Jew in early 1900s Russia.
This book is very well written and provocative. I found it somewhat tedious and arduous, but that is the point. I think the author brilliantly evoked the frustrations of the main character. While reading it, I felt as though i kept being strung along, waiting for something to happen. At the end it occurred to me that that was likely the author's intent.
PS This novel i More...
This book is very well written and provocative. I found it somewhat tedious and arduous, but that is the point. I think the author brilliantly evoked the frustrations of the main character. While reading it, I felt as though i kept being strung along, waiting for something to happen. At the end it occurred to me that that was likely the author's intent.
PS This novel i More...
Dec 27, 2009
Anjuna
rated it:
I couldn't put this book down, despite little cheeriness within the pages. I found this story of a Jew in early 20th century Russia, accused of a crime he did not commit, for reasons akin to a witch-hunt to be both horrifying and compelling. You know you're reading a gifted author when the thoughts of someone not leaving his cell for several years keeps you spellbound. Spoiler alert.......... I'm a little unsure of what I think of the endings in which you are dying to know what happens to the
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Apr 02, 2011
Ian
rated it:
Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner is a nightmare rendered masterfully as art. Yakov Bok's story is that of human dignity, and the search thereof even in the most indignant of circumstances. According to Yakov, if he has a philosophy, it's that things in this world can be better.
And this perhaps is the book's greatest legacy. In the insightful foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer, he says that the world is the broken thing and that everyone can be its fixer More...
And this perhaps is the book's greatest legacy. In the insightful foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer, he says that the world is the broken thing and that everyone can be its fixer More...
Oct 24, 2009
Tom
rated it:
Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess
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Jun 27, 2011
Olga
rated it:
This book is criticized for its heavy-handed ideology. To which my reply would be that it is immensely difficult for a modern-minded person, Jewish or not, to think about such things as the Beilis case. To write about it, to force it into a story and to develop the character one knows from the outset is doomed - this is unimaginable terror in my view and requires a remarkable power of mind and heart.
A review of this book from the NYTimes back in 1966: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/re... More...
A review of this book from the NYTimes back in 1966: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/re... More...
Jul 15, 2011
Julie
rated it:
The kind of story that humbles you abruptly and entirely--deftly pulls ignorance out from under your feet and dangles you in a terror you have been shielded from, and thus must watch. The kind of story that halts your world and hurdles you into another one of flickers of light in vacuums of pain--neither of which you understood and both which you shall redefine. I think of how these paradigms shrunk and hardened my grandfather when I visualize Yakov teetering nobly under their weight--and I ha
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Nov 12, 2010
Matt
rated it:
I love Russian literature, I love the nihilism, the conflict between belief in the self and faith in (religion and creator) that is often a theme in Russian literature. I love the reoccuring theme of oppression, corruption, survival and eventual resolution and redemption.
This book...
Too much time in jail, too much hopelessness in jail, too much oppression. The author didn't know when to stop crushing the lead character and allow him his moment of redemption. But More...
Aug 24, 2010
Matt
rated it:
Malamud's tale of Yakov Bok, an unobservant Jew in Tsarist Russia arrested and framed for the ritual murder of a Christian boy in Kiev, is a story in isolation and loneliness. The majority of the book sees Bok in prison, and the majority of Bok's time in prison is in mentally crippling isolation. The reader feels that he is with Bok as he goes through feverish spells and is wracked with doubt about his future.
I read this book back in high school and decided to read it again, as I cou More...
I read this book back in high school and decided to read it again, as I cou More...
Apr 06, 2008
Thomas
rated it:
i was in the middle of reading a well-written novel about a man who, because he was jewish, was being rail-roaded for a murder he did not commit in pre-WWI Russia, forced to languish in prison without an indictment (let alone a trial) in the hopes of torturing an admission of guilt out of him, when all of a sudden:
"If the law does not protect you, it will not, in the end, protect me."
... and I was transported to the present day, and the hundreds of men who are More...
"If the law does not protect you, it will not, in the end, protect me."
... and I was transported to the present day, and the hundreds of men who are More...
Mar 26, 2008
Nate
rated it:
This was a hard one for me to get through. It's been a while since I've read a Russian author, mostly because I remember the cloudy viscous feeling I get whenever I read a story so thick with the horrible things people do to one another. This book reminded me of Tolstoy and Nabakov a little. Bernard Malamud, the author, is american, but the story takes place in the Ukraine just before the first world war. Yakov Bok is a poor small town handyman who gets caught up in a huge political maelstrom af
More...
Sep 24, 2009
Dawn
rated it:
I thought this would be a good complement to a history class on the importance of the Bill of Rights. This book demonstrates the prejudice against the Jews in Russia and the lack of justice in the Russian legal system. A Jew is held in prison for 3 years without an indictment and because anti-semitic people want him to be guilty. Yakob refuses to make the miscarriage of justice easy for the prosecutor. The treatment of the prisoner was excruciating and reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's book.
Jun 30, 2011
Joel
rated it:
I loved every page. I'm not a huge fan of books on social injustice (they all kind of seem the same to me). I picked this one up because it was older and it took the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. I was not let down. It's a powerful and disturbing work of art with a very unique ending that I wasn't expecting. It gives you a better perspective of what life was like for Jews in Tsarist Russia, a topic I knew next to nothing about. Not for the faint of heart.
Dec 19, 2010
Miriam
rated it:
Half-way through this book, I had to stay up to keep reading...in order to make sure I didn't have nightmares. Of course, what I didn't realize, was that the treatment of the title character got worse with each successive chapter.
This tale of shtetl life, corruption, anti-Semitism, and unflagging devotion to justice is both inspiring and heartbreaking. More than once, my breath was taken away, suffering along with the fixer in his solitary cell, doing his best not to lose his mind More...
This tale of shtetl life, corruption, anti-Semitism, and unflagging devotion to justice is both inspiring and heartbreaking. More than once, my breath was taken away, suffering along with the fixer in his solitary cell, doing his best not to lose his mind More...
