Shosha – Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
Singer was no novelist. As a short story writer he excelled, and that’s because he could work within a limited scope. In this novel the incidents are excellent; they just don’t connect up to form a coherent plot. Still, I was involved and often impressed by the flow of ideas from his characters: “. . . eternal life would be a calamity. Imagine some little shopkeeper dying and his soul flying around for millions of years still remembering that once it had sold chicory, yeast, and beans, and that a customer owed it eighteen groschen.” Or: “I don’t recall who said it, that a corpse is all-powerful, afraid of no one. All the living want and ever hope to achieve the dead already have – complete peace, total independence.” The book is set in Poland on the eve of Hitler’s invasion, and it seems like a recapturing by Singer of the life of Jews in that precarious time. His main character, Arele, is a passive (though sexually active) young man who finds it difficult to make decisions; he’s one of many Jews who could get out of harms way but doesn’t. A decision he does make and sticks to is to marry Shosha, a girl he had known when they were children. He describes her as “infantile – physically and mentally backward.” He seems like a protective father of a vulnerable child; I never believed (despite Singer’s half-hearted efforts to convince me) that their feelings for one another went deeper than that. It’s also clear that Singer reached a point where he wanted a way out of all the personal and political crises that had accumulated. So, on the brink of disaster, he simply abandons the narrative. He closes the book with an Epilogue which takes place thirteen years later. Arele has become a famous author; on a visit to Israel he meets a friend from the past, and we get a brief account of the fate of the characters. Concerning Shosha’s death, there’s not a scintilla of emotional impact. I accepted this ending because to go on was too momentous a task, and both Singer and I had grown weary.

Adam and Evelyn – Ingo Schulze (German)
Schulze writes in a cryptic way. Not the prose – that’s clear enough. But in his narrative the reader is constantly having to connect the dots. Characters will talk about an event that we weren’t privy to, and through their words we have to figure out what happened. Or a chapter will begin with a dialogue between two people, but it will be a while before the identity of one of them is revealed. That type of thing. An added difficulty was that the plot involved political problems in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary (secret police, shootings by border guards, etc.). Though the novel was written in 2008, it seems like a Cold War is still going on; at any rate, I had no idea what the situation was. There’s a lot of traveling by car, a lot of boundaries crossed, and I was lost geographically. However, I stuck with the book because I liked Adam’s third person voice and found his predicament interesting. His wife Evelyn catches him having sex with a woman for whom he’s making a dress (dressmaking is his profession). Evelyn leaves him, he follows. He seems sincere in his remorse and his determination to convince her that they should stay together. Along the way he picks up a young hitchhiker (Katja), and they hit it off (though Adam keeps things platonic). When he occasionally meets up with Evelyn the signals she gives are mostly negative, though she also says that she needs time to make a decision about their marriage. Then, abruptly, Schulze switches to Evelyn’s POV and we find her in bed declaring her love to another guy (Michael). At this halfway point in the novel the complications had risen to an unacceptable level, and I decided that these people would have to work out their futures without me.

Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm
I like Max. I like his collection of stories, Seven Men (particularly “Enoch Soames”), and some of his essays are the best I’ve read. I also like him as a person, as portrayed in those essays and in a book about him entitled Portrait of Max by S. N. Behrman. But I didn’t like his only novel, Zuleika Dobson. Others do: the Modern Library selected it as one of the best novels written in the English language in the 20th Century and the Heritage Press deemed it worthy of a deluxe boxed edition, oversized and adorned with art work. The subtitle of Zuleika is “An Oxford Love Story,” and maybe if I went to Oxford (as did Max) and had a rollicking good time there (as did Max), the novel might hold some charm for me. But I doubt it. The plot hinges on a female so alluring that every man who sees her (even a glimpse is enough) immediately falls in love. But Zuleika’s problem (though it doesn’t much bother her; nothing does) is that she can only love someone who doesn’t give a hoot about her. When the self-absorbed Duke initially shows no interest, she becomes enamored; but when he ‘s suddenly stricken by her beauty, and he too becomes a devotee, she loses all interest. So he decides to commit suicide. Soon every young man at Oxford makes the same decision: they will die for love of Zuleika (something she blithely accepts). What follows from this fantastical premise is decidedly earthbound; besides some silly antics, we get a lot of tiresome talk from people I found unlikable and uninteresting. An artist by the name of George Him has crammed the pages with ninety-six drawings, both in monochrome and color; they’re atrociously garish cartoons. His depiction of the bewitching Zuleika shows her as a vapid painted doll (which may, actually, be fitting). I don’t know whether all the Oxford young men commit suicide because I didn’t read far enough to find out.

Vanish in an Instant – Margaret Millar
In this superior mystery the mystery element takes second place to a psychological study of a varied group of individuals. The third person narrator, an attorney by the name of Meecham, has the problem of loneliness; others are much worse off, and some are emotionally crippled. Lives are entangled, and the untangling makes up the plot. Meecham has an inkling that the motivation for a murder lies in the past, and that it hinges on the identity of a shadowy woman by the name of Birdie. But he’s no sleuth able to perceive what the reader cannot see. Nor does he dispense justice. At the end he lets the person who committed the murder go unpunished. Punishment would serve no purpose, and the guilty party has often treated those in need with kindness. As for Meecham, he finds love. Millar doesn’t establish much of a reason for the love to emerge, she just grants it. I didn’t object; in this grim melange some hope of happiness was welcome. Margaret Millar was married for over forty years to the crime novelist Ross MacDonald. Vanish is similar to his Lew Archer books in the psychological probing, the sharp characterizations, the dark vision of life. I can imagine the two of them typing away, working out the fates of lost souls, and the picture that emerges is somewhat unsettling. I’ve read all the Archer novels – I was, at one period in my life, addicted to them – and now I plan to read more of Millar.