I certainly would not have read this ethereal fiction if it had not been for the recommendation of a friend who often shares my literary tastes. The Toronto author has had three books of poetry published and there are many places where this vague story could be considered to be poetry.
What little plot there is centers on the life of Jacob Beer, an orphaned Warsaw Jewish boy who escapes the Nazis to Greece, spending four years in hiding, then emigrating to Toronto, narrated in the first person singular. However the last 100 pages are narrated by a literary friend of his in the 1990’s as he searches for meaning in the lives of various characters, including the late Jacob Beer, their ancestors, and various other peripheral characters in the world of literature and music.
The time setting is constantly changing and I had some minor difficulties keeping the peripheral characters straight. However my main disappointment was the excessive sentimentality, introspection, and nostalgia and the vague often meaningless interposition of poetic schizophrenic gibberish such as:
“Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant.
To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved by repetition.”
or
“Tavern, oasis, country inn on the king’s highway. Way stations. Dostoyevsky and the charitable women in Tobol’sk. Akhmatova reading poetry to the wounded soldiers in Tashkent. Odysseus cared for by the Phaikians on Sheria.”
The latter quote is inserted in the middle of the description of the narrator’s exploration of the ancient streets of Athens.
Perhaps readers with an imagination that lets them make connections that are beyond those of us with more concrete ways of thinking could enjoy this book, but I cannot recommend it.
Thanks,
Michelle.
The Passionate Reader 