HIMMO, KING OF JERUSALEM

by Yoram Kaniuk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 1968

This Israeli author, whose interesting novel The Acrophile was published here in 1961, patinas with irony a strange and brilliant construction about war casualties and their keepers in a wartime hospital as they shadowbox with the faithful presence of death. That there should be any challenge at all to death is the first and most penetrating irony, and Kaniuk supplies the most bizarre of circumstances. Coolly beautiful Hamotal, nurse in a Jewish-held hospital established in an ancient Christian monastery in Jerusalem, tries in a distinctly felnale collaboration to undercut death. Her battleground, her chosen collaborator, is a truncated near-corpse of what was once a beautiful young man--Himmo, named ""The King of Jerusalem"" because of his amatory conquests. (Certainly a comment on the body politic.) Limbless, blind, lacerated, in shock. Himmo is a comic hero in a cruel cosmic joke. The witnesses--patients, doctors, nurses, a doggedly profane but gallant nun--supply a frogs' chorus of scatological, theological, scientific, gossipy commentary on Hamotal's devotion to the force of life and the defiant, masculine, human courage she is sure is there. But ""the dummy"" slavers and begs to be shot, in spite of Hamotal's exquisite care. It is, in the end, Himmo's lack of response to her sexuality, her demand for life, that changes the Angel of Mercy to the Angel of Death, and she gives him the fatal injection. And there is the last indignity as the King of Jerusalem weeps for his waning life. A caustic but very moving and penetrating probe of men's various fantasies and sacrificial offerings before the inevitability of death.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION