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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
 Middle Eastern Dreaming Aug 27, 2008
By Ibn Khaldun
A wild ride through a surreal landscape of the past forty years, from Berkeley to Gaza. Grounded in historical and anthropological fact, though written with more than a touch of Joyce and Vonnegut. This is a dreamwalk through the reality, fantasy and psychology of the Middle East and the West, made against the cultural background of racism, politics, drugs and universal human madness.
Postmodern Sendup Aug 22, 2008
By Gale Girl
"literary groupie"
As Billy Benson lies in ambush on the Gaza Strip, he retraces his steps across four continents and through the seductive insanity at the University of Michigan and University of California, Berkeley during the sixties and seventies. Like Candide, somehow he manages to retain a spirit of hope and optimism even as he encounters signs of racism and anti-semitism in his heros. His account may be the longest single sentence in the English language!
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Billy's Dream Jan 28, 2009
By L. Griffith
The novel opens with the striking image of nine spread-eagled Israeli soldiers laid out like sunflower petals in a circle exhausted from a double time march in the desert. The time, as best as one can guess, is around the time of the 73 Arab-Israeli war. From there it is Michigan in the 1950's followed by Berkeley California in the 1960's followed by Israel in the 1970's. The central character of the novel, a certain Billy Benson, is the son of Detroit auto executive and it his long 300-page "dream" that is in effect the novel.
What does Billy dream about? Well, lots of things. Growing up in Michigan in the 1950's, beautiful women, his on-and-off relationship with an Israeli girl called Rivka, graduate school, Berkley California in 1960's and the 73 Arab-Israeli war to mention only a few.
The Poetics of Racism is not a character novel driven by a tightly constructed plot. It is more like a long poem written entirely in the third person with not a single word of dialogue. Barzev is first and foremost an intellectual historian and political commentator with a strong interest in sociology and anthropology. He delights in highlighting the most egregious cultural absurdities of the 1960's: white kids from wealthy backgrounds who think it is cool to steal from the university library, a Berkeley co-op that goes bankrupt because of internal theft and political correctness, and a free love commune run by a math professor in which house rules forbid sleeping with the same partner more than three nights in a row.
He also enjoys pointing out the endless factionalism in Jewish history, the most hilarious example of which is the partitions in certain Israeli chicken coops in the 1930's built so that atheist and Zionist kibbutzniks did not have to see each other when gathering eggs!
Combined with the politics is an exploration of Jewish identity issues and a heavy dose of anthropology theory including a discussion of "deference displays" in chimpanzees followed by a comparison of deference displays when Christians, Muslims and Jews pray to their God.
Overall, a good read for those with an interest in the intellectual history of the 1960's or Jewish identity issues. The book's alphabet soup typography - individual letters within each word vary in point size -- is off-putting at first, but barely noticeable after the first dozen or so pages.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Arabist/Zionist Connundrum Aug 27, 2008
By Andrew P. Wilson
"Big Andy From Detroit"
Arico Barzev portrays Amerikan/American schizophrenic mideast foreign policy in military-dreamtime poetry. The Arabist/Zionist conundrum is the mental minefield around which Billy Benson's story revolves. It chronicles his misadventures wandering from Motown to Berserkely, Yaounde to Moscow and on to Jerusalem. This is post-literate utopian political tragi-comic social science fiction. Written in a cacophony of fonts sans punctuation,it evoke the emotional in-your-face appeal of graphic art.
Subtleties of post-modern Arabism segues into Jihad. A shadow world of intrigue puts Zionism on the defensive
as collaborationist Arabist/JIhadis seek to trip them up on the world stage.
In a replay of post-WWII France where resistance fighter (resistants) are edged out of government jobs by stealthy collaborators holding the reins of the security services of post-war France, so it is today in the United States. Arabists, enriched by access to weath based on oil revenues, are weeding out Zionist sympathizers.
The artists, film stars, and literati in the "Free World" have their "collbos" as well. As in Vichy France, most people are "attentistes", content to leave national issuesto leaders like Marshal Petain to wait for better days. And, as in Vichy France, where communists morph into facists, progressive/liberal members of politico-religious groups, as well as the "Old Guard" behind the Iron Curtain have become Arabist in orientation. As in Vichy France, Jews, even Israelis, are not immune to the money and honor and good feelings of belonging that Arabist collaboration brings.
Billy dreams about an alternative to the psychoanalytic Marxist structuralism of Levi-Strauss and his post-modern spiritual descendants. He explores the science underlying love and hate of the "Other" and dreams about "Race" in a period of reverse colonialism.
Following Trubetzkoy's idea of "marking theory" as extrapolated by Jakobson, Greenberg, and Frake, Billy sees language as an iron corset - making us prisoners of a delusion. Much as we try to avoid it, our social vision is filtered to perceive a top and a bottom in social catagories such as class, ethnicity, religion, and race as well as sex.
The straightjacket of sex is as powerful as that of race - the stuggle for the top just as fierce. For better and for worse, the West is no longer a man's world. Women's code governs every aspect of our lives, especially religiousity. When women do not direct operations in female code - men do it for them.
Billy Benson is The Good Soldier Schweik and Don Quixote. He peers through the mind-fog to remind us all that we are sleepwalkers about to fall off the cliff.
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