Reviews from the past

In My Father’s Court - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)

This autobiographical novel takes place in the Jewish section of Warsaw in the early 1900s. People come to the “court” of the rabbi (Singer’s father) to have all manner of problems settled; through this framework we get a look at a world teeming with the whole range of human emotions. Though the rabbi has to be immersed in this world (often a distasteful task), his desire is to move to a higher religious plane, and he wants his son to take this path. Isaac is initially a listener/observer, but as he grows from boy to young man he becomes an individual with strong ideas of his own. The religious life or the worldly one, with its pitfalls? It’s no contest; the young man doesn’t believe in religion, and the world of sex has too great an allure for him. Along with some of his stories, this is Singer’s best work. * (8 other books by this author are reviewed)

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

There’s talent galore in these pages, but it was untempered. The book was, in the beginning, bright and new. But a pattern set in: Franzen would embark on a section with one of the characters – and it would be good at first, really good – but it would go on too long; first satiation would set in, then it would turn tedious; then I felt a kind of repulsion, because the characters are all weird, unhappy, sick. It’s as if I had been served a wonderful appetizer, a good soup, then wound up eating a long, fatty sausage. It reached a point where something inside me rebelled and I simply could not bear to take another bite.

Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (Russian)

The Guerney translation was recommended, so I reread the book. This time around it remained vital, teeming, funny, alive. It’s mostly composed of set pieces in which Chichikov is at someone’s house, trying to buy dead souls. In this way we get a diverse view of Russian types, and they come across as gargantuan eccentrics. Gogol the writer (and person) is the most eccentric of all, quirky and undisciplined; his mind pops about, describing in loving detail the food at a meal, or smells, or the interior of a room. Primarily, though, his world is dense with human emotions – mostly greed and suspicion and dishonesty (though sex in any form – love or lust – is conspicuously absent). All this takes place in a dreary but imposingly vast Russian landscape. The problems began near the end (a section which wasn’t – wisely, I believe – included in the first version I read). Gogol dropped the framing device (buying dead souls) and Chichikov is placed off stage. There’s a loss of focus and momentum; Gogol makes asides, clowns around, assumes a grandiose language, but a context for his antics is missing. Confusion and aimlessness set in. What had sparkled and leaped ends in a long drawn out morass. But the bulk of the book has great exuberance and is wonderful in a way that only Gogol can be wonderful. I understand why Nabokov admired him so much. * (3)

The Devil Tree - Jerzy Kosinski

What does Kosinski do that makes him so readable? First, his books are thin and therefore not imposing. Then he divides his work into short sections (usually less than a page long) with big spaces between them, so that it’s kind of like eating potato chips for the reader – one section, then another, then . . . He concerns himself with subjects that fascinate people; in this book it’s fabulous wealth and the power it bestows. He puts in a lot of sex (the novel is almost pornographic) and cruelty (less present here than in his other work). He also jumps around to different voices, locales and does so without boring filler. His prose is simple, smooth – easy to read. We have to slow down at the speed bumps of understated meaning (existential void and all that), but, hey, with the lurid stuff waiting ahead, we can put up with that; in fact, it may help us (and the author) feel justified in reading (and writing) this stuff. But there’s much to be learned from Kosinski about engaging a reader; he’s a master of manipulation.

See The Rise and Fall of Jerzy Kosinski