Philosophical, provocative and nervy—an interior novel that manages to encompass a breadth of issues.
An Israeli leader confronts the man who sold him out to the KGB decades earlier in a striking exploration of memory, patriotism, faith and duplicity from Bezmozgis (The Free World, 2011, etc.).
As the novel opens, Baruch Kotler, a 60-something Russian-born Israeli politician, arrives in Yalta as damaged goods. His support of a Jewish settlement on disputed land has outraged the prime minister, one of whose lackeys attempts to blackmail him with photos of his young mistress. Refusing to back down, he pursues some peace and quiet with said mistress, Leora, in the run-down Crimean resort city he fondly recalls from childhood. (The novel is set in August, 2013, and none of the current political turmoil factors into the story.) The home the couple rents, however, is owned by Chaim Tankilevich, who years earlier reported the dissident Baruch to the authorities, leading to a 13-year gulag sentence. If the coincidence seems impossibly unrealistic, the conversations between the two men, and the depth of thought and feeling Bezmozgis brings to them, redeem any such concerns. Chaim has lived on the edge of poverty ever since his betrayal, while Baruch has come away from his ordeal a political celebrity hardly wounded by his affair with Leora. Who deserves esteem or contempt here? Who merits punishment? The debate between the two men is a nakedly allegorical one, connected to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that lays a scrim over the entire narrative. (Baruch’s son is an Israeli soldier with orders to help clear the settlement.) Taking place over the course of one day, the novel offers no pat resolutions to entrenched arguments. But it gains a satisfying tension from its compression, of two men forced to settle accounts in some way about their past in a culture thick with long memories.
Philosophical, provocative and nervy—an interior novel that manages to encompass a breadth of issues.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-28433-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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