The Adventures of Joel Spazierer

“It was never my ambition to be a man of virtue – even if for a while I assumed that morality was hardwired into our genes.” The narrator who tells his shocking life-story in this book is a fraud, a liar and a crook, a forger and even a murderer. In the eyes of the moral majority he is not so much a human being as the personification of evil. And Joel, never one to be plagued by self-doubt, now finds himself wondering if he’s a monster after all... The narrator writing under the (false) name of Joel Spazierer was born in post-war Budapest. He started his career as a delinquent in Vienna, where he went from bad to worse before his criminal vocation took him all over Europe; in East Germany he even managed somehow to become a professor of philosophy. Now in his sixties, he returns to Vienna and meets Sebastian Lukasser, who encourages him to chronicle the amazing trajectory of his life.