Vividly self-aware echoes of one man’s fertile imagination.
Almost 200 gracefully composed poetic vignettes about the inner and outer lives of a writer in modern-day Israel.
This wry, gentle, and unique composition by Hoffmann (Curriculum Vitae, 2009, etc.), translated by his longtime collaborator Cole (The Invention of Influence, 2014, etc.), serves as a witty follow-up to his fictional but similarly structured memoirlike book, The Heart is Katmandu (2001). Here, the author plays himself, but his observations on life in Galilee are no less whimsical than those of his characters. “It’s hard to believe that all this is taking place within a book,” he writes. “The people must be very small.” There is a unique energy in the freedom the author has allowed himself here as he moves from observations on relationships and family to literary criticism to observational portraits of beautiful places, like candles floating on the surface of a Japanese lake. In one sad shard, the author offers a litany of things that might break our hearts: “One-eyed cats. Junkyards. The stairwells of old buildings. A small boy on his way to school.” But there’s a sense of humor floating just beneath the surface. After describing a story in which a man sues the banquet hall after injuring his foot while stomping on a glass, as is traditional, at the end of his wedding, Hoffmann offers this rebuttal. “Imagine for a moment the crucified one coming down from the cross and hiring a lawyer,” writes our bemused author. “He’d have thrown history off its course, and who knows what disasters might have ensued.” Even when Hoffmann throws a few barbs at book critics, they’re drolly funny. “As for war,” he writes. “They should call up reserves of literary critics. They’d vanquish the enemy with their weighty pronouncements. Afterwards, the critics could enlist the lethal forces of verbal contortion and extensive annotation to verify that the enemy in fact had been crushed.”
Vividly self-aware echoes of one man’s fertile imagination.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2382-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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