Benjamin's Crossing

Benjamin's Crossing is a 1996 historical novel written by Jay Parini about the Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, and his escape over the Pyrenees from Nazi occupied France into Spain. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the year in 1997.

Praise

 * The New York Times "Parini's story is at once painstakingly researched and dramatically recounted. It locates Benjamin's mystifying traits in a vivid and believable psychology. And it has something important to tell us, not just about Benjamin but about the role of the intellectual in modern Western society."
 * The New Yorker "A brisk, moving novel containing a parable without confining itself to a parable's two-dimensionality."
 * Booklist: "Parini's vital and affecting vision of Benjamin will do much to preserve Benjamin's precious legacy."
 * Publishers Weekly "In a formidable display of intellectual and imaginative sympathy, Parini novelizes the life and death of Walter Benjamin, one of the major literary and cultural critics of the twentieth century."
 * The Philadelphia Inquirer "Parini's exquisite achievement-and exquisite is exactly the word for his poet's fluid prose-is that the social criticism he channels through Walter Benjamin in this novel is as troubling today as then."
 * Kirkus Reviews "A moving, impressively informed novel based on the life of one of the century's most austere, provocative, and tragic intellectuals, Walter Benjamin."