Vividly self-aware echoes of one man’s fertile imagination.
Almost 200 gracefully composed poetic vignettes about the inner and outer lives of a writer in modern-day Israel.
This wry, gentle, and unique composition by Hoffmann (Curriculum Vitae, 2009, etc.), translated by his longtime collaborator Cole (The Invention of Influence, 2014, etc.), serves as a witty follow-up to his fictional but similarly structured memoirlike book, The Heart is Katmandu (2001). Here, the author plays himself, but his observations on life in Galilee are no less whimsical than those of his characters. “It’s hard to believe that all this is taking place within a book,” he writes. “The people must be very small.” There is a unique energy in the freedom the author has allowed himself here as he moves from observations on relationships and family to literary criticism to observational portraits of beautiful places, like candles floating on the surface of a Japanese lake. In one sad shard, the author offers a litany of things that might break our hearts: “One-eyed cats. Junkyards. The stairwells of old buildings. A small boy on his way to school.” But there’s a sense of humor floating just beneath the surface. After describing a story in which a man sues the banquet hall after injuring his foot while stomping on a glass, as is traditional, at the end of his wedding, Hoffmann offers this rebuttal. “Imagine for a moment the crucified one coming down from the cross and hiring a lawyer,” writes our bemused author. “He’d have thrown history off its course, and who knows what disasters might have ensued.” Even when Hoffmann throws a few barbs at book critics, they’re drolly funny. “As for war,” he writes. “They should call up reserves of literary critics. They’d vanquish the enemy with their weighty pronouncements. Afterwards, the critics could enlist the lethal forces of verbal contortion and extensive annotation to verify that the enemy in fact had been crushed.”
Vividly self-aware echoes of one man’s fertile imagination.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2382-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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