A mysterious medieval epistle, bumbling romantic efforts and plenty of feel-good spirituality combine to offer good...
Rabbi Kushner’s first novel for adults echoes The Gift of Asher Lev and The Da Vinci Code, but offers neither the former’s gravitas nor the latter’s intrigue.
Kalman Stern is a middle-aged, divorced scholar of Jewish mysticism. One of his most treasured possessions is an old book that a stranger in Safed, Israel, gave him. He finds in it a page glued inside the crumbling back cover, which appears to be both a kabalistic meditation and a love letter. Stern begins a search for the person who wrote the letter, and to find out what the letter means. He’s also on a personal quest. After years of lonely bachelorhood, he’s pursuing an astronomer who shares his interest in cosmology. The author interweaves Stern’s story with that of the letter-writer, a mystic in medieval Castile. Also strewn throughout are quasi–magical-realist asides in which Stern returns again and again to Safed. In each scene, the stranger who gave him the book (think Clarence, the ditzy angel in It’s a Wonderful Life) offers Stern new insight into the meaning of life and the shape of the universe, e.g., “The event horizon is not somewhere out there; it is homogenously distributed throughout all creation.” Kushner can be awfully didactic, as when he lets Stern lecture his date—and the reader—about “mystical monism” (the idea that “God is simply all there is”). Kushner also regularly interrupts the story’s flow with passages like, “Kabbalistic thought reached its zenith a century later with the appearance of what is now known as the Zohar.” Still, the hero’s likable quirkiness will hold many readers till the end.
A mysterious medieval epistle, bumbling romantic efforts and plenty of feel-good spirituality combine to offer good prospects for decent commercial, if not literary, success.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7679-2412-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Morgan Road/Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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