Zeruya Shalev: "Late Family (Terra)"

Zeryua Shalev is an Israeli writer who gained critical acclaim after publishing the novel Love Life, which was translated into more than 25 languages (the Polish translation from the original Hebrew language appeared in 2003). With Love Life she started a trilogy which was completed with the publication of Late Family in 2005, available now on the Polish book market in a beautiful hardcover edition.

Shalev's three novels are all written in the form of internal monologue of the protagonist who is always at a critical point of her life. First, in Love Life, the woman, infatuated with her father's childhood friend - a man twice older than she - lets her marriage fall apart by pursuing the erotic adventure. The sensuous prose, quite daring erotic scenes and the humiliation that she experiences during her sexual romp make the book an exciting journey into the mind of a woman who seems to be deranged with, well, a destructive passion. At that time Zeruya Shalev was sometimes compared to Erica Jong. The second novel of the trilogy, Husband and Wife, explores what happens in a marriage after twenty years of life in apparent security and comfort. The health crisis of the husband, who wakes up one morning and is unable to move, turns out to be a symptom of the crisis that the couple has been going through for some time. Brutally honest in her scrutiny of the protagonist's motives and most intimate thoughts, Zeruya Shalev offers again a disturbing narrative which some readers might even find too disturbing to go through.

Finally, in Late Family the readers are witnessing a personal crisis of a woman who decides to break up her family and leave her husband to search for freedom and independence. In its depiction of doubts and emotions of the protagonist, who yearns to go back to the security of her obnoxious marriage the moment she realizes that her dream of independence has come true, the narrative probes into the complexity of the psyche and the puzzling motives behind people's decisions. The novel ends with the protagonist landing in a new relationship which she wants to build because she has fallen in love. Since each of the prospective partners has a child or children, the new family is a very fragile and precarious construct when you look at it, and it is doubtful whether the woman will ever be able to feel as secure as she did with her reliable and predictable ex-husband.

Being such an honest analysis of a woman's psyche, the novel does not leave its readers with an obviously positive ending. There are a few nagging questions that arise after the reading is completed: Is this all desire to be independent in life just a naive dream, a fiction created by those who are bored with the routine - but also safety - of marriage? Is there any alternative to the normative pattern of life (that is marriage) that could be satisfying, or are people made in such a way that a solitary existence scares them to death and makes them pursue anybody willing to share life with them, maybe only because they are scared as well? It is because of the ability to pose such questions that I find the novel so brilliant.

P.S. Here is an interview with Zeruya Shalev in which she reveals her political views (something she never does in her novels) and where you can find out some facts from her life, career and learn about an injury which she incurred in a terrorist attack.

Jennifer Lee Carrell: "Interred with Their Bones"

The title of the original American edition is taken from the play Julius Caesar: The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. In Britain, however, it was changed to a less demanding and maybe more catchy The Shakespeare Secret. The Polish translation of Lee Carrell's thriller, which one Amazon.com reviewer called much ado about nothing, links the novel titled as Szyfr Szekspira ("The Shakespere Code") with Dan Brown's immensely popular The Da Vinci Code or, for some, with Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club (Klub Dantego). This is why I bought the book. And for Shakespeare. 

True, the novel may not be such a page-turner as those by Brown or Pearl, it does not lead to a decisive solution or a new discovery, either. Also, the choice of the narrative voice (first person) somehow fails to enhance suspense, though I can't tell why. The reviewer on "You're History" webpage says: this is a didactic book, in which the action is frequently brought to a standstill by the need to explain history, event, dates, and theories and is of the opinion that this might have been a stronger work if the subplot, with its focus on the perennial debate over the Bard's true identity, had been left for another novel. Well, that is precisely what I loved about the book, but - if I remember correctly the idiom by now most probably obsolete -  one man's meal is another man's poison.   

 

And so, the apparent weaknesses can easily be turned into the novel's strengths: first-person narration has an advantage over a usually more authoritarian third-person narrator in that the story sounds personal; moreover, the point of view being subjective, no definite opinion is imposed on the reader. Just the opposite: because no final solution is offered at the end (except for the usual who is who in detective fiction), the novel is a good point to start research on your own (a teacher should say that the text is a "springboard for follow-up activities";). 

Of course I had had a vague memory of the debate on the true identity of Shakespeare prior to the reading of this novel (Marlowe and Bacon), however, I had never made up my mind on the issue. A few years ago, when I was required to study Francis Bacon's philosophy, I was struck by the convergence of his ideas proposed in The New Atlantis and those proposed in Shakespeare's plays - then I meant The Tempest. But still, no definite decision was made. The novel, leaving the issue of the authorship of Shakespeare's works open, inspired me to look for information and to settle the issue for myself. Here's briefly what I gained after the reading was completed: 

First, I learned that the originator of the Shakespeare-Bacon theory was an American scholar Delia Bacon, who lived in the first half of 19th century. She gained support for her research from Emerson, financially she was once aided by Hawthorne. She ended up insane, unfortunately.

Second, I read Mark Twain's wonderful essay "Is Shakespeare Dead?", which otherwise I would have never come across. His common-sense argumentation convinced me that the Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the Shakespeare works. Iconoclastic? Hardly so. 

Last but not least, from what I have read in Delia Bacon, Mark Twain, Thomas Looney and in other sources available on the Internet, I gather: I am a Baconian (like the aforementioned and Nietzsche... la,la,la;). I don't mind the company.  Well, one issue settled for me.

P.S.  I will surely read Lee Carrell's The Speckled Monster. And I will do my best to include Cedar City in my August itinerary...

David Lodge: "Deaf Sentence"

"Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic. Take Oedipus, for instance: suppose, instead of putting out his eyes, he had punctured his eardrums. It would have been more logical actually, since it was through his ears that he learned the dreadful truth about his past, but it wouldn't have the same cathartic effect. It might arouse pity, perhaps, but not terror. Or Milton's Samson: O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, without all hope of day. What a heartbreaking cry of despair! O deaf, deaf, deaf, ... doesn't have the same pathos somehow. How would it go on? O deaf, deaf, deaf, amid the noise of noon, / Irrecoverably deaf, without all hope of sound. No."   

This is the David Lodge I admire: scrutinizing, analyzing, still biting, and - contrary to what the blurb says - displaying huge appetite for research. Although much less hilarious than my favourite Small World or Changing Places, Deaf Sentence is funny and demonstrates that despite his loss of hearing, the author hasn't lost the ability of turning embarrassing experiences (the book is said to be highly autobiographical) into comic situations. After all, the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow, as Mark Twain once remarked. 

The title plays on the phonetic similarity of the words "deaf" and "death" and the novel also treats about death - the protagonist's father dies at the end. Two simultaneous processes are then observable: the protagonist's isolation from life imposed by his growing deafness and his father's isolation from life brought about by senility leading to dementia and finally to death.

  Death seems to actually dominate the novel: the protagonist visits Auschwitz, he gets fleetingly involved in carrying out research connected with stylistic analysis of suicide notes, he remembers his first wife's death of cancer (mercy killing, to be precise).  I somehow cannot get rid of the impression that "Deaf Sentence" by a wicked twist does become "Death Sentence" in this novel and the book is a sort of "suicide note" from David Lodge, who has decided to retire from writing fiction.  SAD. 

 

On the other hand, however, the parallelism of  "deaf" and "death" allows the author to end on an optimistic note for readers: ... now it seems more meaningful to say that deafness is comic and death is tragic, because final, inevitable, and inscrutable.  I will be waiting then.