Jay Parini is a master of a rare genre: the lyrical-biographical novel. The reader is already well aware of his book “The Last Resurrection” about the finale of the life of Leo Tolstoy, which formed the basis of the film of the same name by Michael Hoffman starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, who were nominated for an Oscar for their roles. In the novel “Benjamin’s Way” Parini addresses to the biography of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. With his complex fragmentary texts, which can be interpreted indefinitely, Walter Benjamin surprisingly turns out to be a topical thinker right now, falling into the spirit of the time more accurately than many of our contemporaries. The fact that the philosopher died in 1940 in the Spanish border town of Portbou, fleeing from Nazi-occupied France, Parini tells in the prologue through the mouth of Gershom Scholem, a friend of Benjamin and a prominent researcher of kabbalism. Next, the floor is given to both the philosopher himself and various people who knew him - friends, a guide through the Pyrenees, a former lover who invited him to Moscow for several years... Soon “Benjamin’s Way” should also receive a screen adaptation: the director will be Pat O’Connor (“ Private Peaceful,” “The Imaginary Life of the Abbotts,” “Stars and Stripes,” “A Month in the Country”), starring Colin Firth.