Book review: ‘Jesus Christ Kinski’ by Benjamin Myers

As the accompanying blurb states, Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It concerns events surrounding controversial German actor Klaus Kinski’s 1971 one-man show in which, following heckling and jeering from the morally outraged crowd, Kinski launched into an off-script ranting attack on the audience in what seems to have been a major psychotic episode. This element of Myers’ story is written in the second person from Kinski’s increasingly demented point of view.

Between Kinski rants is a second tale of an unnamed West-Yorkshire-based writer bearing an uncanny resemblance to Benjamin Myers who is obsessively trying to write a novel about Klaus Kinski throwing a wobbler live on stage when he is supposed to be working on a different sort of novel entirely.

Given its unconventional subject-matter, I was surprised to find myself enjoying Jesus Christ Kinski very much indeed. It’s a short novel, which I read in a single sitting.

Recommended.

Disclosure: I live near Benjamin Myers and have met him on several occasions. We also follow each other on social media.