Swine's Wedding

by Daniel Evan Weiss

Book Overview

By the author of The Roaches Have No King. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1852424192
• ISBN13: 9781852424190
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Refreshingly Dark Dose of Satire

For those who like their satire black, this compulsively readable comic novel is a deliciously dark dose. Weiss takes the awkward and contemporary dance of intermarriage and gleefully ups the stakes until it's transformed into a fiery, high-stakes tango set to the tune of theSpanish Inquisition. The trouble all begins when white-bread WASP Allison Pennybaker and Sephardic Jew Solomon Beneviste announce their engagement. Allison's family gets busy planning an overpriced church wedding that appalls Solomon's intense mother, Miriam. She meanwhile, is occupied creating her own gift for the ill-fated couple -- a family tree that traces the bizarre Beneviste genealogy all the way back to the era of the autos-da-fe. Using squeaky, callow Allision and coolly singleminded Miriam as his narrators, Weiss spins a horrifyingly funny, take-no-prisoners tale in which the past rumbles to life, rearing its head up through the green lawns of American suburbia to curse this interfaith engagement of two innocents. He playfully uses biblical references and other allusions to artfully braiding a black chapter in Jewish history into the present action, and the results are tragicomic. Allison's plump and pompous mother, Louise, is a modern-day reincarnation of Torquemada. A scene where Miriam swoons during a beer-soaked all-American baseball game played by athletes with Spanish surnames is a particularly pleasurable set piece. While keeping all his satirical balls in the air, Weiss displays some remarkable gifts. He plays nimbly with societal stereotypes of WASPs and Jews. The Pennybakers and Benevistes are complex, delightfully unselfconscious and eminently credible. They're immeasurably enriched by Weiss's uncanny and chameleonic talent for writing in a wide range of voices. "The Swine's Wedding" is one of the most original books to come around in a long time: richly symbolic, brilliantly built, witty and disturbing.

Read this book

Imagine a book that intersperses the Spanish Inquisition with modern day religious politics with police reports with sexual hang-ups and somehow doesn't leave you confused or disjointed. The Swine's Wedding surpasses that image. Daniel Evan Weiss is expert at realistic characterization: People in his books say and touching at once. The protagonists and their parents can be loved and hated, and the reader can develop mixed emotions as the plot progresses. This is a book that stays with you after you put it down.

Swine's Wedding is compelling, funny, dark, and horrifying.

Here's an important novelist in our midst, this time taking on a "simple" upcoming Jewish-Christian mixed wedding and turning a laser-beamed lighthouse on the roots of prejudice and oppression. The tale is told in alternating two-diary format (interjected with police reports) of an Episcopal bride and her Jewish future mother-in-law, a form deceptively and often humorously naive that turns painfully razor-sharp, at times literally. Obsession takes many forms, but few writers could mesh agonies over which flatware to choose, and the Spanish Inquisition, with greater insight