The last of Agnon’s six novels to be translated from Hebrew into English, this 1951 work describes the travails of a young Jew in Berlin during the Great War. Agnon (1888–1970) won the Nobel in 1966.
The novel is partly autobiographical. The narrator has the same first name as the author (Shmuel Yosef) and an identical migratory background: from Galicia to Palestine to Berlin and back to Palestine. Shmuel is constantly on the move, from one boarding house to another; he can never find the right combination of landlady, room and furnishings. His search duplicates in miniature the search of Jews for a homeland. Simultaneously the war has thrown Shmuel off his game. He has been unable to work on his book, a history of clothing, since the war began. Instead he carries out an assignment to assess the library of the late Dr. Levi, as requested by the scholar’s widow. This involves a train ride to a town outside of Leipzig. The trip proves futile; the house is locked and the widow is in the hospital. But Shmuel runs into an old friend, a former actress now operating a nursing home for war victims. One of her patients has been transformed into a golem, a zombie, by battlefield horrors. He attaches himself to Shmuel and thus is reunited with his mother, Shmuel’s Berlin landlady, who had dreamt of this homecoming. Dreams, legends and anecdotes make up much of the story, which is buoyed by mordant humor and absurdist touches: Shmuel will return to Leipzig to transport the enormous hat of a visiting Christian professor, an “authority” on ancient Israel who knows no Hebrew. The contentiousness of German and Eastern European Jews is another theme, but it’s the war that looms over everything, a character in its own right.
In Halkin’s beautifully fluid translation (he has also supplied a perceptive introduction), we see Agnon’s piquant illustration of a disorientation that feels quite contemporary.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59264-214-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SHORT STORIES
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
Did you like this book?
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
18
GET IT
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
PROFILES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
