Jesus Christ Kinski

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers, read by Rory Kinnear.

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Cuddy

November, 1971. Berlin, Germany. Opening night.

Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands.

After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicized one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turn on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last. After this week, he will never perform on stage again.

Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic.

In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture, and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.

Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It is a daring act of literary ventriloquism, a meditation on censorship, creativity, loneliness – and just how far our tolerance is tested by bad people who make great art.

Praise for Benjamin Myers
‘One of our finest, and most deftly imaginative, writers’ i news
‘Radical and gorgeous’ Max Porter
‘A writer of extraordinary and incandescent talent’ Alex Preston

Critics Review

Jesus Christ Kinski is extraordinary. It is an assault. It is an affront to decency. It is Klaus Kinski, right there on the page. It is hateful. And I loved reading it. It takes real daring to take on such a subject and real skill to carry it off with so much humanity. The talent of Benjamin Myers is something to behold.
SAM JORDISON
The book’s achievement lies in the throbbing life force of Kinski himself. His is a dark star, close to collapse. It offers no guiding light but continues to burn five decades on
NEW STATESMAN
A compelling autofictional account which exerts a strange charm … Plunges us into Kinski’s fevered mind … A riot of salty vituperation
GUARDIAN
Brilliant ... The bravura stylistic flourishes, the wild imagination, the conjuring of a damaged and maddening psyche – this book is strange and electrifying ... When Myers’s Kinski – vituperative, committed, possessed – grabs us by the neck and spits in our faces, deep down we know it’s what we deserve ... One of our brightest young novelists
DAILY TELEGRAPH
An experimental and distinguished novel ... An idiosyncratic and destabilising performance that matches Kinski’s own
SPECTATOR
Highly original, bold, inventive … Myers captures the dark and forceful energy of Kinski and his startlingly aggressive and vicious mind … A stunning rendering
independent.co.uk, Book of the Month
Benjamin Myers is truly one of the most exciting writers we have, and Jesus Christ Kinski cements his reputation as an innovative and versatile author, able to write an astonishing range of styles while remaining utterly compelling and surprising. Here is Myers at his experimental and provocative best, raising questions of literary censorship, commercialism and the separation of one’s appreciation of an artist’s life and work
FOYLES, Top Ten Reads for October
A bravura conceit written with messianic intensity, Kinski coming over like a cross between Hitler and Iggy Pop … Myers is one of the UK’s finest authors, his restless mind never settling on one style or genre, and his latest – a which I read in one sitting – asks questions about the creative process and “the art” vs the artist
THE CRACK
Makes most contemporary fiction look bloodless by comparison
DAILY MAIL
A vivid demonstration of the way in which extreme conditions conjure up unexpected subjects, hovering outside the room, tapping on the window pane, wanting to be let in
TLS
Jesus Christ Kinski is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an unraveling mind. Unflinching, audacious and brutally beautiful, like nothing else you'll read this year
JAN CARSON
A record of Benjamin Myers’ obsessive infatuation with a terrible man striving to embody a holy one, Jesus Christ Kinski is a vivid, singular, unexpected novel from a writer who always surprises and never disappoints
JOHN HIGGS
As wild and tempestuous and unapologetic as Klaus Kinski, Benjamin Myers’s Jesus Christ Kinski is a rollercoaster character study of one of our most loved and hated cultural icons. Myers taps into the fire and fury in Kinski’s art and soul, his workaholic, egocentric and testosterone-driven life, while reveals his vulnerabilities and artistic intransigence. This is a hair-raising performance written and directed by one of the most outrageously imaginative writers of our time
KIT FAN
Rabid with life-force and intrinsically confrontational, Jesus Christ Kinski brings us perilously close to the bars of the cage, the better to behold the monstrous enigma of a man both repellant and magnetic, unforgettable and unforgivable. Benjamin Myers’ timely novel at once asks us how we are to reckon with society’s brilliant-bad, and considers how each of us must accommodate the raging demons that threaten to devour us
ROB DOYLE
Praise for Benjamin Myers: 'Dizzyingly inventive
Daily Telegraph
A visionary epic
Guardian, Books of the Year 2023
It's hard to think of many people who can write with such attentiveness, tenderness and force about the importance of human connection and the redemptive power of art
Wendy Erskine
One of the most interesting, restless writers of his generation
Daily Mail

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