SOURCE: A review of Benjamin's Crossing, in World Literature Today, Vol. 72, No. 2, Spring, 1998, p. 372.

In the following review, Gross offers a positive assessment of Benjamin's Crossing, despite what he asserts are its inaccuracies concerning Marxist thought.

Benjamin’s Crossing is identified on the title page as a novel. And that it is. It also has as its main character a real person, who can lay claim to being the most original and important thinker of the twentieth century. Jay Parini’s novel is quite good, but would probably not get much notice were it not about Walter Benjamin. As a book “about” Benjamin it has both its moments and its problems.

During the last years of his life, in the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin lived in Paris, spending most of his time at the Bibliothèque Nationale, working on his great unfinished book on the Paris Arcades. As...