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Jesus Christ Kinski

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Jesus Christ Kinski

By: Benjamin Myers
Narrated by: Rory Kinnear
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About this listen

Bloomsbury presents Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers, read by Rory Kinnear.

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Cuddy

November, 1971. Berlin, Germany. Opening night.

Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands.

After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicized one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turn on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last. After this week, he will never perform on stage again.

Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic.

In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture, and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.

Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It is a daring act of literary ventriloquism, a meditation on censorship, creativity, loneliness – and just how far our tolerance is tested by bad people who make great art.

©2025 Benjamin Myers (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature

Critic Reviews

Jesus Christ Kinski is extraordinary. It is an assault. It is an affront to decency. It is Klaus Kinski, right there on the page. It is hateful. And I loved reading it. It takes real daring to take on such a subject and real skill to carry it off with so much humanity. The talent of Benjamin Myers is something to behold. (SAM JORDISON)
Jesus Christ Kinski is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an unraveling mind. Unflinching, audacious and brutally beautiful, like nothing else you'll read this year (JAN CARSON)
A record of Benjamin Myers’ obsessive infatuation with a terrible man striving to embody a holy one, Jesus Christ Kinski is a vivid, singular, unexpected novel from a writer who always surprises and never disappoints (JOHN HIGGS)
As wild and tempestuous and unapologetic as Klaus Kinski, Benjamin Myers’s Jesus Christ Kinski is a rollercoaster character study of one of our most loved and hated cultural icons. Myers taps into the fire and fury in Kinski’s art and soul, his workaholic, egocentric and testosterone-driven life, while reveals his vulnerabilities and artistic intransigence. This is a hair-raising performance written and directed by one of the most outrageously imaginative writers of our time (KIT FAN)
Rabid with life-force and intrinsically confrontational, Jesus Christ Kinski brings us perilously close to the bars of the cage, the better to behold the monstrous enigma of a man both repellant and magnetic, unforgettable and unforgivable. Benjamin Myers’ timely novel at once asks us how we are to reckon with society’s brilliant-bad, and considers how each of us must accommodate the raging demons that threaten to devour us (ROB DOYLE)
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