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THE JEWISH HUSBAND

Name: THE JEWISH HUSBAND
Author: Lia Levi
ISBN: 978-1-933372-93-8

by Lia Levi and translated by Antony Shugaar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2009

Dramatic material that has been better explored elsewhere, notably in Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel The Garden of the...

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Levi’s English-language debut, 2001 winner of the Moravia Prize in Italy, uses a romance to dramatize the plight of Jews under Mussolini.

It’s love at first sight when Dino Carpi approaches the beautiful young woman lying on the ballroom floor in his parents’ hotel in Rome. She has broken her leg in a fall. Dino is a teacher, a classicist and an admirer of the Greek poet Pindar, who prized the harmony which Sonia exemplifies. This happened in 1930. It’s now 1967, and Dino, an old man in Tel Aviv, is writing his life story as a long letter to a recipient in Italy whose identity will remain unknown until the end. (It’s an awkward device.) The story hinges on the fact that Sonia is a Gentile and Dino is a Jew, though only the twice-a-year kind (Yom Kippur and Passover). She reciprocates his love, and the nonobservant Dino accedes to the demands of Sonia’s father, a wealthy banker and ardent fascist, that their marriage be Catholic and his Jewish roots stay hidden from their prospective children. Such a wimp does not make a stirring protagonist, and there’s no drama in Dino’s plodding account of his relationship with the equally passive Sonia. Their wedding and honeymoon barely rate a mention. Sonia’s family are reactionary bores, with the exception of rebellious kid sister Lorenza and witty, iconoclastic cousin Gherardo. They provide the only sparks of life until 1938, when Mussolini turns up the heat with his anti-Semitic proclamations. Dino is fired; his father sells the hotel. Pliant as ever, Dino goes along with Sonia’s plan (hatched by her father) for him to disavow paternity of his six-year-old son Michele; he even agrees to the annulment of his marriage. Only when militantly antifascist Lorenza dies in a suspicious “accident” does Dino express his outrage, but it’s too little, too late, and his solo flight to Palestine is anticlimactic.

Dramatic material that has been better explored elsewhere, notably in Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-933372-93-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TONIGHT IS ALREADY TOMORROW
by Lia Levi ; translated by Clarissa Botsford

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.