Yet a hopeful future does beckon, as Kaniuk ends his rich, demanding, life-affirming masterpiece. Not an easy read, but not...
The cyclical nature of history and the repetitive sufferings of the Jews are analyzed with initially forbidding, eventually revelatory complexity in the great Israeli writer’s previously untranslated 1982 novel.
Kaniuk (Commander of the Exodus, 2000, etc.) employs a virtually Faulknerian dreamlike logic in constructing this intricate fiction, which we enter through the agonized viewpoint of an unnamed “Germanwriter” who is importuning relocated Jews for their memories of the elusive title character, Ebenezer Schneerson. We gradually learn that Schneerson, a concentration camp inmate whose talent for woodcarving probably saved his life, thereafter became a willed amnesiac who could recall no details of his own life, but “remembered” the entire range of Jewish culture, its literature and history and science (e.g., Einstein’s Theory of Relativity) and religious doctrine, word for word. Schneerson became the partner (in effect, the property) of fellow Holocaust survivor Samuel Lipker, who organized public demonstrations of the phenomenal memory of this incomparably and inexplicably eloquent “acrobat of words, annals, history.” So complete was Ebenezer’s immersion in the past that he had become effectively stranded in time, a citizen of all the ages, though not of the one he literally inhabited. No sooner does Kaniuk establish this stunning paradox than he replicates it, developing at exhaustive length two conflicting versions of Lipker’s life (as a prosperous American theater impresario, and as a freedom fighter in the new Israel, who takes the name of his ancestor, a 15th-century kabbalist), and the history of Ebenezer’s son Boaz, whose restlessness and rootlessness lead him to serve in the 1948 War of Independence and to the subsequent creation of an “industry” that fabricates memorials to martyred Jews. Thus do sons seek their fathers, shattered families seek reunion and embodiments of the legendary Wandering Jew repeatedly re-enact the old, sorrowing myth of exodus and hardship and return.
Yet a hopeful future does beckon, as Kaniuk ends his rich, demanding, life-affirming masterpiece. Not an easy read, but not to be missed.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-1811-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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