The son of a German mother and a Hungarian father who fled the
country in 1956, Timur Vermes was born in Nuremberg in 1967. He
studied history and politics and went on to become a journalist. He
has written for the Abendzeitung and the Cologne Express and worked
for various magazines. He has ghostwritten several books since
2007. This is his first novel.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR: Jamie Bulloch's translations include Ruth
Maier's Diary, Portrait of a Mother as a Young Women by F. C.
Delius, and novels by Paulus Hochgatterer and Daniel Glattauer.
Look Who's Back, the film, is streaming on Netflix!
An Independent Best Books of the Year selection
A New York Times Summer Reading Pick
"Look Who's Back offers searing cultural and political commentary
in the guise of a wildly entertaining story."--Paste Magazine
"Look Who's Back is Hitler satire at its best . . . while there has
been much debate over whether or why it's appropriate to laugh at
Vermes's relentless Hitler satire, this well-researched and
uproariously cringe-worthy book makes it hard not to . . . It is
ultimately a sort of commentary on Hitler's first ascent to
power-on the point at which a charismatic man starts being taken
seriously, and what that transition entails . . . laugh-out-loud
funny."--Kira Bindrim, Newsweek
"[A] wickedly satiric first novel . . . Hitler is, of course,
deadly serious, and the dissonance between his earnest bigotry and
the vacuousness of our media-soaked age is the comic grist that
propels the novel toward its truly ironic conclusion. While German
journalist -Vermes has a good deal to say about the state of
contemporary Germany, his reach here is more universal, as he's
crafted a sardonic send-up of a media and a world where the message
doesn't matter so long as your ratings are high and your videos go
viral on YouTube."--Library Journal
"A hilarious, yet poignant look at today's world through the eyes
of one of its most horrific villains . . . the political and social
satires translate will through the language barrier as the
translator, Jamie Bulloch, did a fantastic job in the
writing."--Seattle Post Intelligencer
"Both funny and frightening, this is a subtle, historical study of
the commanding nature of a fanatical demagogue, as well as a savage
critique of contemporary western culture . . . a powerful and
important book."--Sue Gaisford, The Independent on Sunday
"For Vermes's novel is not so much a satire on Third Reich
revisionism and nostalgia--although that plays its part--as on the
blank ironies of amoral and fad-crazy multi-platform media. For
parallels, think Sacha Baron Cohen and Chris Morris. The undead
Fuhrer gets his first big break on a show hosted by a
Turkish-origin comedian called Ali Gagmez."
--Bolyd Tonkin, The Independent
"Hilarious . . . The appeal of the story is our our own reaction to
a monster's view of how we live today. And being chilled by our own
empathy with his disgust toward the media, politicians, government
and, of course, technology . . .Vermes could have made the star of
this book anyone from history. He's really telling us about
ourselves."--Esther Cepeda, Washington Post syndicated
columnist
"It is 2011 and Hitler is back and going viral in a darkly
entertaining satire."--The Sunday Times
"Packed with wry, close-to-the-knuckle hilarity, and builds to a
gloriously ironic conclusion."--Mail on Sunday
"The joke is not on the reanimated Fuhrer, spouting predictably on
immigrant and Jews, but on the ironic flippancy of the YouTube
generation . . . rollickingly enjoyable."--Angel Gurria-Quintana,
The Financial Times
"Thrillingly transgressive."--The Guardian
"Very funny . . . The frisson of reading Look Who's Back comes from
its seamless transition from Borscht Belt one-liners to disturbing
invocations of the legacies of Nazi rule. Mr. Vermes gives us a
bracingly double-sided Hitler-the arresting public speaker and
astute negotiator who loves dogs and small children, and also the
fanatical champion of political violence, global tyranny and ethnic
cleansing . . . Translator Jamie Bulloch helps by providing a
glossary at the close of the book, but what people will remember is
his perfect rendering of the ridiculously orotund, yet oddly
compelling, manner of Hitler's speechifying."--Sam Sacks, The Wall
Street Journal
"Very funny"--Financial Times
"We're startled into a genuine laugh . . . Vermes plays all of this
straight, or at least deadpan. He is not a historian, but his
presentation of the minutiae of Hitler's life amounts to an
impressive feat of historical research . . . the ventriloquism here
is impressive . . . The most striking and provocative feature of
the narrative, in fact, is not the decision to resurrect Hitler but
the choice to use him as a first-person narrator - to risk telling
us more about Hitler than could be known, in Forster's
phrase.--Daniel Torday, The New York Times
"What would happen if Adolf Hitler woke up in modern-day Berlin? In
a bestselling satirical novel, he'd end up a TV comedy star . . .
[Look Who's Back] has unsurprisingly sparked debate in a country
that has grappled for decades with Hitler's unconscionable
legacy."--Time
"You know his name. You know his face. You know his hair and
mustache, which are caricatured with sharp, witty minimalism on the
cover of Look Who's Back, in which a baffled Adolf Hitler is
returned to the even more baffled German people. Now you'll also
know Timur Vermes, whose debut novel has created a sensation in
Germany. [Look Who's Back] is desperately funny . . . Mr. Vermes
has created an ingenious comedy of errors in which the jokes are
either on Hitler's misapprehensions about the modern world or the
modern world's refusal to take him at face value . . . Read this
book."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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