Jerusalem Poker

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This is a book organized around friendships, and that is one of its real strengths on a character level. I really felt Joe's connection with Ahmad, Liffy (oh Liffy!), Bletchley and the Sisters. Again, not as much with Stern, because when Joe gets to Stern he sort of starts ranting at him, and so the dude we're expecting answers from spends a lot of time sitting and listening to Joe speechifying so there is not as much a connection show. The romance in the book is kept small which is good, because I found the scenes with Joe and Maud (who is now connected to Stern) rather too sentimental, and didn't jibe with a harder view of other things in the world. Actually I expected Maud to betray Joe, but in the end this doesn't seem to have happened, though it might have also been too subtle to me. (Again, I am rambling. There is a LOT in this book.) Munk Szondi used his unique knowledge of Levantine commodities to make money. According to the rules of the game, anything of value could be used in the betting. Thus when a pile of Maria Theresa crowns and chits representing Egyptian dried fish futures were on the table, Szondi would overplay his hand simply to get the fish. In the next fifteen years Whittemore went on to write four more wildly imaginative novels, his Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. Reviewers and critics compared his work to the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. Publishers Weekly called him our best unknown novelist. Jim Hougan, writing in Harper’s Magazine, said Whittemore was one of the last, best arguments against television…. He is an author of extraordinary talents…. The milieu is one in which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it is totally transformed by the writer’s wild humor, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of time and history. Whittemore explores many different themes, and his meandering plots and fascinating characters are what make the books such pleasures to read.”

IN THE FIRST LIGHT of an early summer day a naked Junker baron and his naked wife both elderly, both heavily overweight and sweating, stood on top of the Great Pyramid waiting for the sunrise. A profoundly nutty book full of mysteries, truths, untruths, idiot savants, necrophiliacs, magicians, dwarfs, circus masters, secret agents … A marvellous recasting of history in our century. — The New York Times Book Review The Jerusalem QuartetMore precisely, Whittemore didn’t soar so much as tunnel. He tunneled under the surface of Jerusalem, following the three-thousand-year-old antiquities dealer Haj Harun in his tattered yellow cape and dented Crusader helmet down through the physical layers of the place—one era’s stones laid on top of the previous one’s to create a vertical history—and into the existential city, the one we really inhabited if we could only escape daily reality long enough to see it. Don’t know, do I. Just guessing though, I’d say it has something to do with having been through too much for my age. Excessive experience, I mean. It’s worn me down until now I’m worn out. Here I am only twenty-one years old and I’m already a veteran of a war that was fought nearly seventy years ago. And that’s a weight for a man to carry. Do you follow me? But before the final hand is played to determine the destiny of the Holy City, a dangerous new player enters the picture: Nubar Wallenstein, an Albanian alchemist determined to achieve immortality, and heir to the world’s largest oil syndicate. He finances a vast network of spies dedicated to destroying the players, and his aim is to win complete power over Jerusalem./divDIV

And spies live perilously… They hunt for secrets… They always live under the unbearable psychological stress… They are always in fear… They have nowhere to run… Their private lives lie in ruins… The four books which make up the Jerusalem Quartet are among the richest and most profound in imaginative literature… . A superlative body of work. —Jeff VanderMeer Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, New York, Crete, Jerusalem, New York, and now Dorset. Along the way he had many friends and companions; he was not a particularly good husband or father and disappointed many. But gradually he had found his voice, written his novels, and fallen in love with Jerusalem. I would like to think that Ted died dreaming of his Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stonecutter turned medieval knight, turned antiquities dealer, Haj Harun. For Whittemore was the eternal knight-errant who made it at Yale in the 1950s, lost it in the CIA, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with the voice of a mystic. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed the best of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great-grandfather the minister and his great-grandmother the writer would have been equally proud of him. His spirit rests peacefully in Dorset, Vermont.If this is, as we are assured, Whittemore’s greatest work, then you need not read the rest. Having said that, why rate it as three stars? It hints at more than it delivers, but what it does deliver has the possibility of opening new worlds of thought, if not history and introspection. Isildur1 had a reputation that precedes them. They would play any player and create a buzz, unlike any poker player before them. Lesley Hazleton’s books include the award-winning Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Where Mountains Roar. She lived thirteen years in Jerusalem, reporting on the Middle East for Time, The New York Times, Esquire, The Nation and many other publications. In a Whittemoreish move, she now lives and writes on a houseboat in Seattle. Prologue