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FALLING OUT OF TIME

Name: FALLING OUT OF TIME
Author: David Grossman
ISBN: 978-0-385-35013-6

by David Grossman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2014

Rich, lyrical, philosophically dense—not an easy work to take in but one that repays every effort.

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A genre-crossing, pensive, peripatetic novel by Israeli author Grossman (To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.).

Grossman’s previous novel described a walk across the scorching Judean desert in quest of peace. The walking continues in this book, a blend of verse, drama and prose that recalls Karl Kraus’ blistering Last Days of Mankind (1919) in both subject and form. Where Kraus described the self-immolation of Europe in World War I, Grossman ponders a world in which “[c]old flames lapped around us,” a world caught up in formless, chaotic conflict about which we know only a few things—especially that people, young people, have died. The “Walking Man” goes in quest of the lost, but, leaving his home and village, he manages only to encircle it in an ever-widening ambit. Says “The Woman,” “You /circle / around me / like a beast / of prey,” but he is searching, not hunting, his circling an apparent effort at exhaustiveness. Others join him, the predator-prey metaphor working overtime: One woman likens her spirit to “a half-devoured beast / in its predator’s mouth.” In the end, Kraus gives way to a modernist verse reminiscent of Eliot: “We walk in gloom. / Across the way, on gnarled rock, / a spider spins a web, spreads out his taut, / clear net.” The lesson learned from such observations? Perhaps this: Though death is final, the fact of death continues to reverberate among the living, awed and heartbroken.

Rich, lyrical, philosophically dense—not an easy work to take in but one that repays every effort.

Pub Date: March 25, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-35013-6

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE THINKING HEART
by David Grossman ; translated by Jessica Cohen

- BOOK REVIEW
MORE THAN I LOVE MY LIFE
by David Grossman ; translated by Jessica Cohen

- BOOK REVIEW
A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR
by David Grossman ; translated by Jessica Cohen

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS

by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1942

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These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.