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
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
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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