Book review: 'Whipping Boy' narrates a man's search for his childhood bully

Whipping Boy

The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully

By Allen Kurzweil

Harper. 304 pages. $27.99

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Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg

Revenge is a dish best served between the cold, hard covers of a book.

That is the lesson of Allen Kurzweil's Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully. Kurzweil, a best-selling novelist and children's book author, is an engaging narrator, notably lighthearted considering the obsessive nature of this book.

Soon after Kurzweil arrived at a Swiss boarding school in fall 1971, he met his roommates, including the bully of the book's subtitle, Cesar. At 10, Kurzweil was the youngest of the boys at the school and also one of the smallest. The school, Aiglon, was an odd mash-up of traditional, buttoned-up British institutions like Eton and the back-to-nature self-reliance of German health clubs.

Neither culture offered much refuge for a boy whose roommate gave him nightmares, fed him frightening foods, and beat him while listening to Jesus Christ Superstar.

In the early days of the Internet and social networks, Kurzweil tried fruitlessly to find out what had become of Cesar. There were several complicating factors: Cesar was probably, but not certainly, from the Philippines; over the years, he used a variety of last names; even the alumni office at Aiglon didn't know where to find him.

Once Kurzweil turns up the man he thinks is his childhood nemesis, it takes several chapters - fascinating chapters - for Kurzweil to explain what he'd gotten up to. Cesar turns out to be the front man for a crooked multibillion-dollar banking organization, the Badische Trust Consortium, that made loans in the hundreds-of-millions range. Cesar brought in clients who deposited funds to secure loans - loans that never materialized, deposits that weren't returned.

The story of the Trust is fascinating on its own, and Kurzweil's telling has a kind of spirited bafflement. Who would have thought one's childhood nemesis would grow up to be a genuine bad guy?

The book wouldn't be complete without Kurzweil coming face to face with the man who'd dominated his imagination for so long.  Their meeting is both what he expected and not, what he needed and something else entirely. Ironically, Cesar's memory is now faulty, whereas his victim-turned-pursuer has stockpiled memories. But that's what makes writing an art. The real life Cesar lived may have faded in places, as memory does, but an obsessive author and gifted storyteller can shape it into a tale worth telling.