Joshua Cohen
My book-swapping friend lent me this paperback, deliberately not telling me anything about it; she only said, somewhat cryptically, "I am really interested to hear what you make of this one."
And that's just it - I am not at all sure what I make of it. What I can say with certainty is that it is not a book I recommend.
The sub-title says "An account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family" - does that help?
Maybe it helps when I give you a brief summary of the story: In the winter of 1959/60, a Jewish historian at a college in the U.S. is asked to help assess Professor Benzion Netanyahu, an exiled Israeli scholar applying for tenure at the college.
We learn a little bit about the historian's relationships with his colleagues and get some background about his family life. Two letters arrive for him from Israel, one endorsing the professor, the other one warning against him. These letters take up an entire chapter each, and are very lengthy and... sprawling, is the term that first comes to my mind.
Then the Professor himself arrives at the house of the historian and his family - but he's not alone: Unexpectedly, his wife and three sons are with him. The sons are 7, 10 and 13 years old and are Iddo, Benjamin and Jonathan.
According to the information given on the back of the book, it is a "wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending identity, and politics". I'm afraid that almost all of the comedy was lost on me - there was exactly ONE sentence uttered by the historian's visiting mother-in-law that made me laugh out loud. I don't find pushy, demanding people humorous, nor do I chuckle when visitors don't know how to behave and wreak havoc with their hosts' belongings.
It may be a case of me not fully grasping the intellectual depth of it all; in any case, what kept me reading was the relative shortness of the book and wanting to know where it was all heading.
The author mixes fact and fiction; the characters of Professor Netanyahu, his wife and sons are real, with their real names, and the middle boy, Benjamin, is the man we know today as Israel's Prime Minister. The last few pages of the book (called "Credit & Extra Credit" shed some light on what's fact and what the author imagined, and I looked up the Professor and his family members on wikipedia to find out more.
But I can not say this is a book I'd list for the Pulitzer Prize (it won in "Fiction") or see it as one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2021 - admittedly, taste and opinion varies from one reader to the next, but this reader was left more or less shrugging by the end of the book, and feeling some relief at finishing it.
You can learn more about the author and his work here on Wikipedia, or here on his own website.
I don't think this is a book I would like to read on the basis that I don't like fact and fiction mixed together. For me a book should be entirely fact or entirely fiction.
ReplyDeleteIt depends; for instance, Elif Shafak's "There are rivers in the sky" mixed historical facts (about Mesopotamia, the decyphering of cuneiform writing, the persecution of the Yazidi people) with the lives of fictional characters. Those characters served to make history - distant past, not-so-distant past and present - come alive.
DeleteYour review is sufficient to convince me that I need not read this book, so, thank you.
ReplyDelete