Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls — an alternative to the world’s craziness

Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls is a delightfully funny novel that, though written some time ago, perfectly captures the craziness of 2019 in America.

Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo BallsFor the sheer pleasure of it, I was reading a couple of travel short stories by my friend, author Gary Buslik. He really is an extraordinary writer. His short stories are complex without being confusing; his images are incredibly rich; and the emotion pulsing through the stories comes through clear and strong without ever overwhelming the narrative.

Gary is also very funny, as you can tell just from the title of his travel book, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it’s Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen. If you’re not up for a full-length travel book, but prefer anthologies, Gary’s essays are included in The Best Travel Writing 2011: True Stories from Around the World and the less elegantly titled Wake Up and Smell the Shit: Hilarious Travel Disasters, Monstrous Toilets, and a Demon Dildo.

What I really want to write about here, though, is Gary’s novel Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls: A Novel of International Intrigue, Pork-Crazed Termites, and Motherhood, which is now selling for a nicely discounted $6.95. I think it deserves a re-read because, though written some time ago, it perfectly characterizes the florid craziness that is America — and, indeed, the entire Western hemisphere — at the dawn of 2019. When I first read the book several years ago, I was constantly laughing. Here’s the review I wrote at the time:


One of my rules of thumb when reading a book, or watching a movie for that matter, is that I have to like at least some of the characters in the book.  Since I’m investing my time in the book or the movie, I want to be in the company of pleasant people.  After all, outside of the entertainment world, I don’t willingly want to spend time in the company of people who disgust me.

I discovered over the past couple of days, though, that there is an exception to this rule, and that exception is Gary Buslik’s Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls: A Novel of International Intrigue, Pork-Crazed Termites, and MotherhoodAkhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls is peopled by some of the most unpleasant, malevolent, and stupid characters you can imagine — but it’s so clever and funny that I, the reader, was delighted to follow their complicated, self-serving, insane machinations.

I’m actually not quite sure how to describe the book without diluting the pleasure you’ll get should you decide to read it.  The book’s own description doesn’t do it justice, but I’ll offer it for what it’s worth:

Iranian president Akhmed teams up with the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba and their American intelligence agents to smuggle radioactive matzo balls into Miami Beach. But intelligence being as slippery a concept to these nincompoops as chicken fat on linoleum, when each member of the gang decides to ladle out his own personal nuke soup, holy terror Akhmed is left steaming. Will his plan to destroy America float like a fly or sink like a lead dumpling?

Star-crossed lovers, conniving academics, and blustery social climbers collide with ravenous termites, international do-badders, and multi-level marketing in a plot as fast-paced and hilarious as a runaway mountain bus. Radioactivity has never been so much fun.

Those bland paragraphs leave out the delights of seeing the inside workings of the mind of a far-Left academic, keeping up with the Iranian president’s manic dancing, watching the Venezuelan dictator dream of mass-marketing schemes, and generally following a serpentine plot that moves effortlessly from Iran, to Cuba, to Haiti, and to the high seas, with stopovers in Chicago, New York and Miami Beach.

One of the things I liked best about the book is that Gary Buslik loves words.  His prose is rich and vivid.  He also recognizes when people, rather than loving words, abuse them for obfuscation and self-aggrandizement.  My favorite character — and, incidentally, the most unpleasant character in the book — is the pompous Prof. Les Fenwich.  Buslik has clearly been studying the Leftist academic mind very closely.  Watching Les giving himself permission to order Kobe dish at an expensive restaurant is a rare pleasure:

Unlike the Delmonico, this Kobe meat sat well with Les’s conscience.  Kobe was Japanese beef, from Japanese cows that had been fed only the finest grains, never force-fed, never rushed to market.  True, at a gazillion dollars a pound . . . the meat did seem a bit pricey, but didn’t we owe them that?  Didn’t we racistly and cruelly intern Japanese-Americans at the start of World War II?  Didn’t we murder, maim, and genetically deform thousands of their civilians — the elderly, women, children, handicapped — by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — vile, unnecessary, barbarous acts whose only true motive was a show of force that would ensure the supremacy of the American military-industrial complex?

And on and on, until Les concludes that it’s his patriotic duty as an America-hater to order Kobe beef.  But really, how could Les think otherwise?  As his former lover remembers him, he is a completely hypnotic speaker, if you like bombastic, unintelligible prose:

His long, complex sentences, stitched with discursive subordinate clauses, phrase slathered upon phrase, digression after digression, turned on themselves in eddying pools, only to eventually emerge into grammatical Valhalla — the syntactical equivalent of rapids rushing over a waterfall before settling into a placid alpine lake.  She adored the way he used compound adjectives, convoluted modifiers that precariously dangled, metaphysical tropes, and Latinate roots with Anglo-Saxon appendages.

(Right now, I’m trying to convince myself that I am a better and less pompous writer and speaker than Prof. Les Fenwich.)


If you’d like to take a step back from today’s rather frightening insanity, while at the same time having a good laugh about it, I cannot recommend highly enough Gary Buslik’s Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls: A Novel of International Intrigue, Pork-Crazed Termites, and Motherhood.


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