Consider yourself warned.
An elegant NYU professor at the peak of his powers and pleasures is reduced to a quivering puddle by a violent, unsought, yearlong spiritual awakening.
For 52-year-old academic superstar Andrew Cohen, the term charisma is a “cheap inadequacy.” “His dress and appearance, his speech and body language, his ideas and their expression—all had a refined aristocratic finish that splendidly gilded everything he touched.” He has a 26-year-old girlfriend, Ann Lee, and a stunning apartment overlooking the river; he publishes in the New Yorker; he even has a good relationship with his ex-wife. Was a character ever more cruelly set up for a fall? Namdar’s debut follows poor Andrew for a year beginning on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Elul in 5760, or Sept. 6, 2000, when he has the first of many increasingly intense spiritual experiences which will ultimately destroy his sanity and his life. The myriad subsequent chapters are each identified by both a Hebrew and a regular date and grouped into seven “books.” These books are separated by pages telling a second story set in ancient Israel and designed in the style of the Talmud, and this is just the tip of the iceberg vis-à-vis the self-importance of this apocalyptic, overwritten, bloated screed against assimilated American Judaism and self-satisfied elite academics. Between the fusillades of exclamatory prose, the innumerable dream sequences, hallucinations, and visions, the detailed and repetitive descriptions of vile pornography and disgusting physical phenomena, the tedious chunks of student papers and other quoted material, the clear hostility of the author toward the main character, the brutally slow pace and repetitive plot development, and the bizarre, ill-advised handling of 9/11, one begins to wonder if Namdar is intentionally punishing the reader. Is S&M a literary genre? Maybe in Israel, where this novel won the Sapir Prize, that country’s equivalent of the Man Booker.
Consider yourself warned.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-246749-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
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
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