At its best, this story of a Jewish immigrant family tested by fate is as haunting as it is entertaining and as fresh as it...
A revision of Cheuse's 1986 novel The Grandmothers' Club, this mystical tale traces the rise and fall of a prominent rabbi, Manny Bloch, who goes into business with a brother-in-law named Mord.
Told from the perspective of Manny's aged mother, Minnie, through long and discursive sessions with her fellow grandmothers, the book mixes multigenerational family saga, Jewish fabulism and corruption story. Manny commits himself to his faith as a boy after his father, Jacob, is crushed to death by an overturned milk cart while working on the Sabbath. At the behest of his family's benefactor, Ohio businessman Meyer Sporen, and prompted by birds who speak to him in the voice of Jacob, Manny goes to Cincinnati to prepare for his calling. Married to Sporen's daughter, Maby, he becomes a beloved and prominent rabbi but leaves the pulpit to join Mord in running General Banana Company, a fruit importer with holdings in South and Central America. He accumulates a vast fortune. But not everything is kosher about the company, Maby suffers from severe psychological problems, Manny's affair with a Holocaust survivor is not going to end well, and we know from the book's Faust epigraph that things are not going to end well for him, either. Other Jewish novelists have plowed this ground with greater originality and comedic bite, but there's nothing secondhand about NPR reviewer Cheuse's singular narrator, whose delivery and gossipy asides belie her hidden depths.
At its best, this story of a Jewish immigrant family tested by fate is as haunting as it is entertaining and as fresh as it was when it was first published nearly 30 years ago.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941-493-00-7
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Fig Tree Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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