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See Under: Love
David Grossman's masterly fusing of vision, thought, and emotion make See Love a luminously imaginative and profoundly affecting work.
In this powerful novel by one of Israel's most prominent writers, Momik, the only child of Holocaust survivors, grows up in the shadow of his parents' history. Determined to exorcise the Nazi "beast" from their shattered lives and prepare for a second holocaust he knows is coming, Momik increasingly shields himself from all feeling and attachment. But through the stories his great-uncle tells him―the same stories he told the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp―Momik, too, becomes "infected with humanity."
"A dazzling work of imagination."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
In this powerful novel by one of Israel's most prominent writers, Momik, the only child of Holocaust survivors, grows up in the shadow of his parents' history. Determined to exorcise the Nazi "beast" from their shattered lives and prepare for a second holocaust he knows is coming, Momik increasingly shields himself from all feeling and attachment. But through the stories his great-uncle tells him―the same stories he told the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp―Momik, too, becomes "infected with humanity."
"A dazzling work of imagination."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
David Grossman
142 books1,188 followersFrom ithl.org:
Leading Israeli novelist David Grossman (b. 1954, Jerusalem) studied philosophy and drama at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later worked as an editor and broadcaster at Israel Radio. Grossman has written seven novels, a play, a number of short stories and novellas, and a number of books for children and youth. He has also published several books of non-fiction, including interviews with Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Among Grossman`s many literary awards: the Valumbrosa Prize (Italy), the Eliette von Karajan Prize (Austria), the Nelly Sachs Prize (1991), the Premio Grinzane and the Premio Mondelo for The Zig-Zag Kid (Italy, 1996), the Vittorio de Sica Prize (Italy), the Juliet Club Prize, the Marsh Award for Children`s Literature in Translation (UK, 1998), the Buxtehude Bulle (Germany, 2001), the Sapir Prize for Someone to Run With (2001), the Bialik Prize (2004), the Koret Jewish Book Award (USA, 2006), the Premio per la Pace e l`Azione Umanitaria 2006 (City of Rome/Italy), Onorificenza della Stella Solidarita Italiana 2007, Premio Ischia - International Award for Journalism 2007, the Geschwister Scholl Prize (Germany), the Emet Prize (Israel, 2007)and the Albatross Prize (Germany, 2009). He has also been awarded the Chevalier de l`Ordre des Arts et Belles Lettres (France, 1998) and an Honorary Doctorate by Florence University (2008). In 2007, his novels The Book of Internal Grammar and See Under: Love were named among the ten most important books since the creation of the State of Israel. His books have been translated into over 25 languages.
See also other authors with similar names.
Leading Israeli novelist David Grossman (b. 1954, Jerusalem) studied philosophy and drama at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later worked as an editor and broadcaster at Israel Radio. Grossman has written seven novels, a play, a number of short stories and novellas, and a number of books for children and youth. He has also published several books of non-fiction, including interviews with Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Among Grossman`s many literary awards: the Valumbrosa Prize (Italy), the Eliette von Karajan Prize (Austria), the Nelly Sachs Prize (1991), the Premio Grinzane and the Premio Mondelo for The Zig-Zag Kid (Italy, 1996), the Vittorio de Sica Prize (Italy), the Juliet Club Prize, the Marsh Award for Children`s Literature in Translation (UK, 1998), the Buxtehude Bulle (Germany, 2001), the Sapir Prize for Someone to Run With (2001), the Bialik Prize (2004), the Koret Jewish Book Award (USA, 2006), the Premio per la Pace e l`Azione Umanitaria 2006 (City of Rome/Italy), Onorificenza della Stella Solidarita Italiana 2007, Premio Ischia - International Award for Journalism 2007, the Geschwister Scholl Prize (Germany), the Emet Prize (Israel, 2007)and the Albatross Prize (Germany, 2009). He has also been awarded the Chevalier de l`Ordre des Arts et Belles Lettres (France, 1998) and an Honorary Doctorate by Florence University (2008). In 2007, his novels The Book of Internal Grammar and See Under: Love were named among the ten most important books since the creation of the State of Israel. His books have been translated into over 25 languages.
See also other authors with similar names.
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June 6, 2012
He realized he had spent most of his life as a daring trapeze artist on that high scaffold, and that he had always been careful not to look down, because looking downward and inward would have frightened him and made him recognize, much to his sorrow, that he wasn't a trapeze artist but a jailor. That somewhere along the line force of habit, fatigue, and negligence had turned him into the accomplice of the people with their hands joined around him.
My twin said something the other day about her plan for solving the unsolvable differences of the big players of the ages. Personally, I think there's a bit of Mariel in this but she is my twin. I mean, I've always said that if you put me in any classroom situation I'd be the only one who doesn't immediately group off with the person closest to their own social type (and I don't even believe in types, not when you get people alone). [Those Filipino mail order brides do not count. It was me or that young man they were convinced would try to rape them if he got too close. I tried to tell them they were safe but what do I know? I'm a slutty American. I make a good foil.] "Put them in a classroom with me and the right winger Christian would have to sit with the Muslim extremist because they would both hate me!" If I could I would do this bit for you guys the way she did it. You know that cliche about it is funny because it's true? Fuck that. Lauren had killer line delivery. "Of course, they would then kill all of the women."
The other day some guy told me that for ages after he first met me he had me pegged for a Jesus freak (until I denied it the other day, actually). I've heard this before (I have also been taken for retarded). Since you will most likely never meet me you'll just have to take my word for this. I don't get how I come across to other people, and frankly, I don't really want to. My paranoid delusions are bad enough. But Jesus freak? Try like a Fallen Angel version of the Jesus freak. This is not against Jesus because Jesus said a lot of good things. (But if you want to get down to it I would take issue with him dying for me or anyone else. I would hope he would ask for more and get more.) I do not have faith in the basic goodness of humanity. How can you when you live in a world where such a large part of the population are imprisoned (to make evil rich bastards even richer. And people don't even care!). Yes, the holocaust, which See Under: Love is about. All of the holocausts suck and I say down with genocide (that's my official stance). Too much shit. I'm sure I don't have to tell you. I know I've said all of this before about what it is inside of regular people to turn it off to care. When something really shitty becomes the norm and then one day it ends and you go back to pretending that the norm is the norm when it is just going on somewhere else.
I know I'm a Jesus freak because I give a shit (I wish I was cool, really I do) and I'm a fallen angel Jesus freak because I'm completely useless. I don't even have anything to give you door to door. What would loving everybody do? I probably COULD by virtue of not looking for bad (mostly I just think people hate me), but as a big mass whole? No way. Don't follow me. They shouldn't go on being shitty and get loved for it. But it is hard to separate from everyone is culpable "we're only human" evil to rabbits eating their babies evil or some for the hard dick evil.
Do you remember what Primo Levi said about how people took Anne Frank into their hearts because the holocaust was too big for them to take in everybody else?
Stalin or Lenin said that the death of one is a tragedy and that the death of millions is only statistics (in the novel it is quoted to Lenin and in an interview Grossman said Stalin. Stalin would have said it once more with feeling, anyway). This is a enlightening interview from The Guardian in 2007 (the English translation of See Under: Love was in 1989) and if you have the time it would be more than worth your while to read what Grossman has to say. I steal this next bit from it:
"In the Drohobycz ghetto during the war, there was an SS officer who exploited Schulz and compelled him to paint murals in his home. An adversary of this SS officer, a Nazi commander himself, who was involved in a dispute with him over a gambling debt, happened to meet Schulz on the street. He drew his pistol and shot Schulz dead, to hurt his patron. According to the rumour, he then went to his rival and told him: "I killed your Jew." "Very well," the officer replied, "now I will kill your Jew."
I learned of this tale soon after I had finished reading Schulz's stories for the first time. I remember that I closed the book, left my house, and walked around for several hours as if in a fog. My state was such that, quite simply, I did not wish to live. I did not wish to live in a world where such things were possible. And such people. And such a way of thinking. A world in which a language that enables such monstrosities as that sentence was possible.
"I killed your Jew." "Very well, now I will kill your Jew."
I wrote See Under: Love, among other reasons, to restore my will to live and my love of life. Perhaps also to heal from the insult I felt on behalf of Bruno Schulz - the insult at the way his murder was described and "explained". The inhuman, crude description, as if human beings were interchangeable. As if they were merely a part of some mechanical system, or an accessory, which can be replaced with another. As if they were only statistics.
I have been ashamed of myself for the (I don't know how else to put this) "shortcomings" of my fictions (hell, my last three reviews on here were about that already). I read See Under: Love years ago, some time in my early twenties and it had meant a lot to me (I was more or less the same person now, if maybe even more confused than I am now). I keep doing this this year. I'll have some kind of crisis about what is "enough" and then I'll run to my bookshelf to restore my "faith" in an old favorite novel. And I picked THIS book that is in a way about how fucked up it is to do this! What is wrong with me?
Are you ignoring the reality by hiding in some story? I know I try to make stories about what I read to get a sense of people, even if I'm totally wrong, so I won't feel like they are some stats. I never felt that this was wrong. But what if you start to go into this place that looks away from things because you do that too much? I could be the asshole who made up a story about how Bruno Schulz died (I would have thought those nazis were fucking dicks, though).
See Under: Love is freaking enormous and I was pulled back in and out of the tide like a story that Schulz escaped and dived into the sea. He is the salmon school. He has fins and a tail and breathes in the briny water that licks your feet not because it worships you but because it kisses you. He's in the net of the stories he wrote. He's in the net of the stories you wrote. I am so lost about when stories are enough and when they aren't.
See Under: Love is told in four parts. I really don't want to do this coming from some place of "not being good enough", really, but I am me and I will probably never get over feeling awkward trying to make "real book sense" when doing these things. I don't know if I SHOULD try to condense this into some point or another. It's a when it is enough and when it isn't enough kind of thing. It's when you can live with something until the point when you find that you can't. That's being human and Jesus can't die to save you from that (and he shouldn't).
Someone else online called the first part "stream of consciousness" and I just felt like he wrote like me (if you find my reviews unbearable you will probably hate this book, anyway). Someone on amazon said they would have thought Grossman was the worst novelist in the world if they had not already loved him because of how this was written. I don't know because I thought it was great! Everybody doesn't think like this?
Okay, Momik is maybe a little bit the little boy that you might want to punch in the face if you are the kind of person that punched completely socially clueless boys in the face (Jesus would have thought those boys and girls deserved what I gave them after what they did). Momik organizes a schedule to give his sandwiches to the school bully in hiding and this is after his negotiations make the bully want to give it all up, to put it in perspective how he kind of had it coming. Even if you wanted to like him he would make it hard. Momik has an uncanny ability to drive away the most determined pity party goers. He writes everything down in a notebook and pretends to predict the future. It's kind of adorable and obnoxious enough for me to like him (who the hell likes overly cute kids in books?). The image of the Israel that is like the kid who would (mouth breathing, naturally) attract flies to his pity honey. Over There. It is still going on Over There. (I feel just as bad for those kids left in orphanages and shunned for their days because German soldiers knocked up their mamas as I do for kids who had relatives in the holocaust. You probably don't want to hear that I would have rather died quickly if I were them. If you want to draw a stick in the sorrow jar are any of them too short?) They pile up on the benches on the way to being alone for Momik to draw all of the wrong conclusions like that toe curling Ramona Quimby story when she humiliated herself in front of the whole class because she chose the wrong meaning of the word "present". Not the same thing, really, but you know what it is like when everybody else seemed to be there the day the answers were handed out and you are left always saying the wrong answer? The Nazis beast. Is it a Nazi hedgehog or nazis chicken or nazis cat? I wasn't there the day they explained humanity. Momik was kind of fucked up torturing those animals in cages in his basement and then trying to lure out "the beast" with his Jewish Grandfather. I kind of loved it. He didn't want to get over some secret that people around him weren't talking about and it made him sick trying to keep their secret for them.
Does Momik have the gift of languages to know what someone else is saying by a few words? A survivor carries the faces of those they left behind like masks to wear all at once. Is it their way of keeping them forever or is it a haunting?
Bruno in the sea. Bruno on the waves and what could come back to Momik? I would throw it into the sea and hope it came back to me if it was really meant to be. Momik is a married man and he's such a twat cheating on his wife -- I don't really want to talk about this. How happy he is to give his love away to someone else (not like Jesus) and how she waits for him to come around because she's trying to make out of their family what he is trying to find out in the answers of the holocaust. It's just his anger and trying to make it right, right? I feel conflicted about his own myths.
Grandfather Anshel was a children's writer before the war. It is funny and not funny (it's not funny) that the philistine Nazi Neigel is the sole person to read him as he had always wanted to be read. Are those stories he has to write enough? Anshel the cynic. Anshel the Scheherezade once before and Scheherezade once more. The life is in his fingers and through the pages and what is that life worth? Just stories. In a place like that there are stories. If you can't have stories in a place like that then stories aren't worth anything. But what if you never leave and your face is always making room for theirs? There are so many dangers.
The final part is an encyclopedia of a boy born named Kazik. Every word is a story. See under: sex and see under: love and see under: art and see under: betrayal and see under: loneliness.
See under: fiction.
Falsehood. A fabricated story.
And all my wretched life within me weeps, the little I have gathered in my wretched lifetime, the fears I feared, and my complexities and ignoble passions, the small amount of love I have known, and even, please forgive me, my God-given gifts and abilities, this ugly character of Anshel Wasserman, fortunate we are perhaps that there is not another such to blemish the beauteous word, and yet, that soul is mine... my only possession, and how unthinkable that it should be so callously destroyed, you did not even ask our names before killing us, and now, let me amuse myself and seek contrition in you, a single twinge or scruple, let me endow you with the idea of compassion, because I need this fiction, and then you may do as you wish."
Neigel: "Do whatever you want, Wasserman. But don't expect something like this to have any effect on me."
I have read this book twice and I don't know if it comes down on the side of fiction. I guess it is down on the side of being Jesus rather than needing Jesus? Jesus in the Jesus Freak story way of hoping for the best and keeping on keeping on? I don't want to make myself sick not knowing the secrets and holding them inside the way that Momik does!
Fried: "And that I won't poison him with the hatred in me."
Marcus: "And with everything I know."
Otto: "That I'll let him grow up manly and brave and willing to believe."
Fried: "And please don't let him be like me. Let him be like Paula."
And Wasserman raised his eyes to Neigel and said, "All of us prayed for one thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war. Do you understand, Herr Neigel? We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war."
That's asking too much.
P.s. This is one of my favorite books ever. I wish I could just talk everyone's ear off about it instead of this! Preferably while staring out over Bruno's wide sea.
My twin said something the other day about her plan for solving the unsolvable differences of the big players of the ages. Personally, I think there's a bit of Mariel in this but she is my twin. I mean, I've always said that if you put me in any classroom situation I'd be the only one who doesn't immediately group off with the person closest to their own social type (and I don't even believe in types, not when you get people alone). [Those Filipino mail order brides do not count. It was me or that young man they were convinced would try to rape them if he got too close. I tried to tell them they were safe but what do I know? I'm a slutty American. I make a good foil.] "Put them in a classroom with me and the right winger Christian would have to sit with the Muslim extremist because they would both hate me!" If I could I would do this bit for you guys the way she did it. You know that cliche about it is funny because it's true? Fuck that. Lauren had killer line delivery. "Of course, they would then kill all of the women."
The other day some guy told me that for ages after he first met me he had me pegged for a Jesus freak (until I denied it the other day, actually). I've heard this before (I have also been taken for retarded). Since you will most likely never meet me you'll just have to take my word for this. I don't get how I come across to other people, and frankly, I don't really want to. My paranoid delusions are bad enough. But Jesus freak? Try like a Fallen Angel version of the Jesus freak. This is not against Jesus because Jesus said a lot of good things. (But if you want to get down to it I would take issue with him dying for me or anyone else. I would hope he would ask for more and get more.) I do not have faith in the basic goodness of humanity. How can you when you live in a world where such a large part of the population are imprisoned (to make evil rich bastards even richer. And people don't even care!). Yes, the holocaust, which See Under: Love is about. All of the holocausts suck and I say down with genocide (that's my official stance). Too much shit. I'm sure I don't have to tell you. I know I've said all of this before about what it is inside of regular people to turn it off to care. When something really shitty becomes the norm and then one day it ends and you go back to pretending that the norm is the norm when it is just going on somewhere else.
I know I'm a Jesus freak because I give a shit (I wish I was cool, really I do) and I'm a fallen angel Jesus freak because I'm completely useless. I don't even have anything to give you door to door. What would loving everybody do? I probably COULD by virtue of not looking for bad (mostly I just think people hate me), but as a big mass whole? No way. Don't follow me. They shouldn't go on being shitty and get loved for it. But it is hard to separate from everyone is culpable "we're only human" evil to rabbits eating their babies evil or some for the hard dick evil.
Do you remember what Primo Levi said about how people took Anne Frank into their hearts because the holocaust was too big for them to take in everybody else?
Stalin or Lenin said that the death of one is a tragedy and that the death of millions is only statistics (in the novel it is quoted to Lenin and in an interview Grossman said Stalin. Stalin would have said it once more with feeling, anyway). This is a enlightening interview from The Guardian in 2007 (the English translation of See Under: Love was in 1989) and if you have the time it would be more than worth your while to read what Grossman has to say. I steal this next bit from it:
"In the Drohobycz ghetto during the war, there was an SS officer who exploited Schulz and compelled him to paint murals in his home. An adversary of this SS officer, a Nazi commander himself, who was involved in a dispute with him over a gambling debt, happened to meet Schulz on the street. He drew his pistol and shot Schulz dead, to hurt his patron. According to the rumour, he then went to his rival and told him: "I killed your Jew." "Very well," the officer replied, "now I will kill your Jew."
I learned of this tale soon after I had finished reading Schulz's stories for the first time. I remember that I closed the book, left my house, and walked around for several hours as if in a fog. My state was such that, quite simply, I did not wish to live. I did not wish to live in a world where such things were possible. And such people. And such a way of thinking. A world in which a language that enables such monstrosities as that sentence was possible.
"I killed your Jew." "Very well, now I will kill your Jew."
I wrote See Under: Love, among other reasons, to restore my will to live and my love of life. Perhaps also to heal from the insult I felt on behalf of Bruno Schulz - the insult at the way his murder was described and "explained". The inhuman, crude description, as if human beings were interchangeable. As if they were merely a part of some mechanical system, or an accessory, which can be replaced with another. As if they were only statistics.
I have been ashamed of myself for the (I don't know how else to put this) "shortcomings" of my fictions (hell, my last three reviews on here were about that already). I read See Under: Love years ago, some time in my early twenties and it had meant a lot to me (I was more or less the same person now, if maybe even more confused than I am now). I keep doing this this year. I'll have some kind of crisis about what is "enough" and then I'll run to my bookshelf to restore my "faith" in an old favorite novel. And I picked THIS book that is in a way about how fucked up it is to do this! What is wrong with me?
Are you ignoring the reality by hiding in some story? I know I try to make stories about what I read to get a sense of people, even if I'm totally wrong, so I won't feel like they are some stats. I never felt that this was wrong. But what if you start to go into this place that looks away from things because you do that too much? I could be the asshole who made up a story about how Bruno Schulz died (I would have thought those nazis were fucking dicks, though).
See Under: Love is freaking enormous and I was pulled back in and out of the tide like a story that Schulz escaped and dived into the sea. He is the salmon school. He has fins and a tail and breathes in the briny water that licks your feet not because it worships you but because it kisses you. He's in the net of the stories he wrote. He's in the net of the stories you wrote. I am so lost about when stories are enough and when they aren't.
See Under: Love is told in four parts. I really don't want to do this coming from some place of "not being good enough", really, but I am me and I will probably never get over feeling awkward trying to make "real book sense" when doing these things. I don't know if I SHOULD try to condense this into some point or another. It's a when it is enough and when it isn't enough kind of thing. It's when you can live with something until the point when you find that you can't. That's being human and Jesus can't die to save you from that (and he shouldn't).
Someone else online called the first part "stream of consciousness" and I just felt like he wrote like me (if you find my reviews unbearable you will probably hate this book, anyway). Someone on amazon said they would have thought Grossman was the worst novelist in the world if they had not already loved him because of how this was written. I don't know because I thought it was great! Everybody doesn't think like this?
Okay, Momik is maybe a little bit the little boy that you might want to punch in the face if you are the kind of person that punched completely socially clueless boys in the face (Jesus would have thought those boys and girls deserved what I gave them after what they did). Momik organizes a schedule to give his sandwiches to the school bully in hiding and this is after his negotiations make the bully want to give it all up, to put it in perspective how he kind of had it coming. Even if you wanted to like him he would make it hard. Momik has an uncanny ability to drive away the most determined pity party goers. He writes everything down in a notebook and pretends to predict the future. It's kind of adorable and obnoxious enough for me to like him (who the hell likes overly cute kids in books?). The image of the Israel that is like the kid who would (mouth breathing, naturally) attract flies to his pity honey. Over There. It is still going on Over There. (I feel just as bad for those kids left in orphanages and shunned for their days because German soldiers knocked up their mamas as I do for kids who had relatives in the holocaust. You probably don't want to hear that I would have rather died quickly if I were them. If you want to draw a stick in the sorrow jar are any of them too short?) They pile up on the benches on the way to being alone for Momik to draw all of the wrong conclusions like that toe curling Ramona Quimby story when she humiliated herself in front of the whole class because she chose the wrong meaning of the word "present". Not the same thing, really, but you know what it is like when everybody else seemed to be there the day the answers were handed out and you are left always saying the wrong answer? The Nazis beast. Is it a Nazi hedgehog or nazis chicken or nazis cat? I wasn't there the day they explained humanity. Momik was kind of fucked up torturing those animals in cages in his basement and then trying to lure out "the beast" with his Jewish Grandfather. I kind of loved it. He didn't want to get over some secret that people around him weren't talking about and it made him sick trying to keep their secret for them.
Does Momik have the gift of languages to know what someone else is saying by a few words? A survivor carries the faces of those they left behind like masks to wear all at once. Is it their way of keeping them forever or is it a haunting?
Bruno in the sea. Bruno on the waves and what could come back to Momik? I would throw it into the sea and hope it came back to me if it was really meant to be. Momik is a married man and he's such a twat cheating on his wife -- I don't really want to talk about this. How happy he is to give his love away to someone else (not like Jesus) and how she waits for him to come around because she's trying to make out of their family what he is trying to find out in the answers of the holocaust. It's just his anger and trying to make it right, right? I feel conflicted about his own myths.
Grandfather Anshel was a children's writer before the war. It is funny and not funny (it's not funny) that the philistine Nazi Neigel is the sole person to read him as he had always wanted to be read. Are those stories he has to write enough? Anshel the cynic. Anshel the Scheherezade once before and Scheherezade once more. The life is in his fingers and through the pages and what is that life worth? Just stories. In a place like that there are stories. If you can't have stories in a place like that then stories aren't worth anything. But what if you never leave and your face is always making room for theirs? There are so many dangers.
The final part is an encyclopedia of a boy born named Kazik. Every word is a story. See under: sex and see under: love and see under: art and see under: betrayal and see under: loneliness.
See under: fiction.
Falsehood. A fabricated story.
And all my wretched life within me weeps, the little I have gathered in my wretched lifetime, the fears I feared, and my complexities and ignoble passions, the small amount of love I have known, and even, please forgive me, my God-given gifts and abilities, this ugly character of Anshel Wasserman, fortunate we are perhaps that there is not another such to blemish the beauteous word, and yet, that soul is mine... my only possession, and how unthinkable that it should be so callously destroyed, you did not even ask our names before killing us, and now, let me amuse myself and seek contrition in you, a single twinge or scruple, let me endow you with the idea of compassion, because I need this fiction, and then you may do as you wish."
Neigel: "Do whatever you want, Wasserman. But don't expect something like this to have any effect on me."
I have read this book twice and I don't know if it comes down on the side of fiction. I guess it is down on the side of being Jesus rather than needing Jesus? Jesus in the Jesus Freak story way of hoping for the best and keeping on keeping on? I don't want to make myself sick not knowing the secrets and holding them inside the way that Momik does!
Fried: "And that I won't poison him with the hatred in me."
Marcus: "And with everything I know."
Otto: "That I'll let him grow up manly and brave and willing to believe."
Fried: "And please don't let him be like me. Let him be like Paula."
And Wasserman raised his eyes to Neigel and said, "All of us prayed for one thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war. Do you understand, Herr Neigel? We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war."
That's asking too much.
P.s. This is one of my favorite books ever. I wish I could just talk everyone's ear off about it instead of this! Preferably while staring out over Bruno's wide sea.
June 27, 2013
The first chapter, "Momix," is brilliant. I suppose it raised my hopes impossibly high, for in the end I could not finish the novel. I stopped around p. 130 of chapter two, "Bruno." I have never seen a novel collapse more spectacularly--almost from one page to the next--as I have here. "Bruno" is so poetic and fanciful as to be unreadable. It stopped me cold when I tried to read it several years ago, and it stopped me cold on this second reading, too. What does the sea have to do with the Holocaust? The metaphor is lost on me, and so to sleep....
August 9, 2008
In the first part of this book, Momik - the young son of Holocaust survivors, born and raised in Israel - says that grownups sometimes call him "alter kop", which in Yiddish means "old head". And he is, in a way, an old man in the body of a child. He is intelligent and painfully serious; he has no friends his own age but is drawn to the aging and deranged Holocaust survivors who populate his neighborhood in Jerusalem (which, believe me, is a creepy enough town as it is). But though wise beyond his years, his experience is still that of a child. He understands that some kind of beast - the "Nazi beast" - did something terrible that drove everyone out of a wonderful land "over there", but no one will explain just what that means. And so he takes it upon himself to find the beast and destroy it, hoping to save the people he loves.
"Alter kop" is also a pretty accurate way to describe Israel during that time, and even today. The country, though it just turned sixty this year, is steeped in thousands of years of tragedy. The Hebrew language is also a strange combination of young and old: it is rooted in the Bible and is rich in history and connotation, but was essentially frozen in time for about two thousand years (though it's since developed at an amazing pace; see for example this cute article in the New York Times). Needless to say, the Israeli literary tradition is also very young. Whereas English fiction writers have thousands and thousands of sources to learn and draw inspiration from, when "See Under: Love" was published in 1986, there were probably fewer than a hundred people who had successfully written or were writing fiction in Hebrew.
So what I think I'm trying to get at here, is that this book is about how Grossman learned to tell an incredible, impossible story with the vocabulary at his disposal, which was, essentially, the vocabulary of a child. And the first part of this book, "Momik", is written in language that a child would use (albeit a child surrounded by a bunch of depressing old diasporics). This is a novella that stands alone - in fact, it was later published in Israel as a separate book - and I think it's the culmination of Grossman's learning process. It is probably the most perfect 80 pages I have ever read. It conveys perfectly the paradox of living in Israel, even today, maintaining a beautiful balance between sturdy Israeliness (for example when a paramedic brings Momik's 'grandfather' home and everyone is panicking, he says, in a dismissive tone that anyone who's been in Israel will be familiar with, "Don't get excited, lady, nothing happened, what can happen?") and the fearful ghostliness of life in the shadow of the Holocaust.
The following three chapters seem to me to be the storyteller's (Momik? Grossman?) way of working up to that perfect story. Well, it's not exactly THAT story that he initially sets out to write - Momik grows up and becomes a writer and decides to try to tell the story of his grandfather, Anshel "Scheherazade" Wasserman, who, while in a concentration camp, wove a tale for a Nazi officer that drew him in so completely that the Nazi was eventually destroyed. That tale appears in the third chapter (which is excellent) and in the fourth and last (written in the form of an encyclopedia; I found it too abstract). In the second chapter, Momik spends most of his time floating face down in the sea, which speaks to him, in a slightly irritating stream of consciousness, all about Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who was shot during the Holocaust. But not the real Bruno Schulz, no: a Bruno Schulz as imagined by Momik, a Schulz who escapes death and swims away with the salmon. That part, to me, read as if the writer had taken some pill to get his juices flowing, and though possibly a necessary part of the process, I kind of wished Grossman hadn't felt the need to include it in the final book. I also have quite a bit of criticism re: Grossman's portrayal of female characters (he always makes sure to emphasize that they're unattractive; none of them are very intelligent and certainly not intellectual; the book talks a lot about "art" and "creation" and the only thing he lets a woman create is a fetus).
I'm giving the book five stars, though, because (a) the first chapter really, truly, is amazing, and the third chapter - which seems to be the story he was actually shooting for - is also great, and (b) he is so incredibly ambitious that I'm willing to forgive the parts that don't work, especially since the availability of good fiction editors in Israel at the time was probably even more limited than the availability of writers.
I don't know if the English translation gets all that across, because the book is very much about language. (I read it in Hebrew, and I'm gonna brag about it, because it took me more than 6 weeks to read the damn thing.) Maybe I'll check it out sometime, but I think it'll probably be a while before I have the mental strength to pick this book up again.
"Alter kop" is also a pretty accurate way to describe Israel during that time, and even today. The country, though it just turned sixty this year, is steeped in thousands of years of tragedy. The Hebrew language is also a strange combination of young and old: it is rooted in the Bible and is rich in history and connotation, but was essentially frozen in time for about two thousand years (though it's since developed at an amazing pace; see for example this cute article in the New York Times). Needless to say, the Israeli literary tradition is also very young. Whereas English fiction writers have thousands and thousands of sources to learn and draw inspiration from, when "See Under: Love" was published in 1986, there were probably fewer than a hundred people who had successfully written or were writing fiction in Hebrew.
So what I think I'm trying to get at here, is that this book is about how Grossman learned to tell an incredible, impossible story with the vocabulary at his disposal, which was, essentially, the vocabulary of a child. And the first part of this book, "Momik", is written in language that a child would use (albeit a child surrounded by a bunch of depressing old diasporics). This is a novella that stands alone - in fact, it was later published in Israel as a separate book - and I think it's the culmination of Grossman's learning process. It is probably the most perfect 80 pages I have ever read. It conveys perfectly the paradox of living in Israel, even today, maintaining a beautiful balance between sturdy Israeliness (for example when a paramedic brings Momik's 'grandfather' home and everyone is panicking, he says, in a dismissive tone that anyone who's been in Israel will be familiar with, "Don't get excited, lady, nothing happened, what can happen?") and the fearful ghostliness of life in the shadow of the Holocaust.
The following three chapters seem to me to be the storyteller's (Momik? Grossman?) way of working up to that perfect story. Well, it's not exactly THAT story that he initially sets out to write - Momik grows up and becomes a writer and decides to try to tell the story of his grandfather, Anshel "Scheherazade" Wasserman, who, while in a concentration camp, wove a tale for a Nazi officer that drew him in so completely that the Nazi was eventually destroyed. That tale appears in the third chapter (which is excellent) and in the fourth and last (written in the form of an encyclopedia; I found it too abstract). In the second chapter, Momik spends most of his time floating face down in the sea, which speaks to him, in a slightly irritating stream of consciousness, all about Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who was shot during the Holocaust. But not the real Bruno Schulz, no: a Bruno Schulz as imagined by Momik, a Schulz who escapes death and swims away with the salmon. That part, to me, read as if the writer had taken some pill to get his juices flowing, and though possibly a necessary part of the process, I kind of wished Grossman hadn't felt the need to include it in the final book. I also have quite a bit of criticism re: Grossman's portrayal of female characters (he always makes sure to emphasize that they're unattractive; none of them are very intelligent and certainly not intellectual; the book talks a lot about "art" and "creation" and the only thing he lets a woman create is a fetus).
I'm giving the book five stars, though, because (a) the first chapter really, truly, is amazing, and the third chapter - which seems to be the story he was actually shooting for - is also great, and (b) he is so incredibly ambitious that I'm willing to forgive the parts that don't work, especially since the availability of good fiction editors in Israel at the time was probably even more limited than the availability of writers.
I don't know if the English translation gets all that across, because the book is very much about language. (I read it in Hebrew, and I'm gonna brag about it, because it took me more than 6 weeks to read the damn thing.) Maybe I'll check it out sometime, but I think it'll probably be a while before I have the mental strength to pick this book up again.
June 1, 2011
Quando si incontra un autore come Grossman la prima cosa da fare è sedersi.
In seguito bisogna munirsi di umiltà, aprire tutti e cinque i sensi all’apprendimento e diventare discepoli di un insegnante che accompagna lungo un percorso profondo, enigmatico, talvolta insidioso, ma infine soddisfacente e di arricchimento personale.
‘Vedi alla voce: amore’ è più di quanto lontano possa esserci da un libro, ‘Vedi alla voce: amore’ è un cammino a tappe volto a far scoprire cosa sia stato quell’evento da tutti conosciuto, da pochi compreso, che ha il nome (errato) di Olocausto, Shoah, Sacrificio; sacrificio di ‘bestie al macello’ messo in atto da una mente e dai suoi corpi esecutori che, credendo nel dislivello della qualità umana, hanno compiuto una strage.
Grossman non compie il solito reportage di quelle immagini che tutti conosciamo di bambini su bambini, corpi su corpi, mostrate dalla televisione e compiante in quell’ipocrita 27 Gennaio in cui ognuno pubblica ‘Se questo è un uomo’ di Primo Levi sul proprio profilo, per poi deridere l’accento del venditore ambulante di colore (chiamato, senza alcun rispetto ‘vucumprà’) il 28 di Gennaio. No, Grossman scava nella psiche di un ebreo, esperto nel rendere l’aspetto più vero, meno ipocrita, meno bisognoso di compassione, di quello che è stato l’omicidio di sei milioni di ebrei; sei milioni di ebrei, ma in fondo l’omicidio di uno per uno di sei milioni di individui, ognuno dotato di una personalità, di un carattere, di affetti ed effetti personali. Non statistica, come la definì Stalin nel suo tragicamente noto aforisma, ma la morte per omicidio di uno a uno di sei milioni di ebrei.
Nel viaggio in compagnia di Grossman si parte bambini con Momik, 9 anni e tante, troppe domande al fronte di poche, troppe poche risposte di quegli adulti che sono genitori ebrei, ma che sono stati deportati e che si sono riusciti a salvare. Ma, salvandosi, non sono riusciti a ricucire del tutto quello che il Terzo Reich, in modo programmatico, sistematico, spietato aveva sfaldato. Urlano nella notte, mangiano come se fosse l’ultimo pasto, scorgono Momik, ma non lo vedono davvero. Cosa sono quei numeri tatuati sul polso? Cosa sono tutti questi misteri sul passato? A produrre il moltiplicarsi delle domande, è l’arrivo del nonno Anshel Wasserman a casa di Momik. Prima di scoprire cosa Wasserman farfuglia, e contro chi si arrabbia nei suoi discorsi incomprensibili sospesi a mezz’aria, bisogna proseguire il viaggio con Momik ormai sposato che incontra Bruno Schulz.
Comprendere il perché dell’introduzione di Bruno Schulz è fondamentale per comprendere il perché Grossman abbia voluto scrivere l’ennesima opera con oggetto: Shoah.
Ridare una morte dignitosa a Schulz, noto scrittore polacco ucciso da un nazista come sfida ad un nazista rivale (‘Ho ucciso il tuo ebreo’ ‘Ora io ucciderò il tuo), significa ridare individualità, dignità personale a tutti quegli ebrei che sono passati alla storia come ‘sei milioni’ e non come ‘uno ad uno’. Schulz viaggia con i salmoni, animali che esprimono la sfida alla difficoltà della vita, per sfuggire agli orrori del nazismo e dell’anti-semitismo.
E con Schulz viaggia anche il lettore sino all’epoca geniale, epoca in cui ognuno torna bambino, e non conosce né male né sofferenze.
Ma la parte più toccante del viaggio, quella che scava più a fondo, quella che provoca lacrime e regala sorrisi, è quella che svela chi è il nonno Wasserman e contro chi farfuglia.
Wasserman farfuglia contro Neigel, Capo del campo di concentramento dove Wasserman è rinchiuso. Neigel, prima di essere un capo SS, è stato un bambino che ha amato le storie che Wasserman pubblicava nella raccolta ‘Ragazzi di Cuore’ e, anziché ucciderlo, gli chiede ancora di narrare. Grazie alle parole di Wasserman, ai suoi racconti mirati, Neigel ricorderà di essere umano, prima ancora che un omicida nazista.
E’ un rapporto forte, solidale, celebrale quello che si instaura tra la vittima e il suo aguzzino, rapporto che si ribalta sino a diventare rapporto tra narratore ed ascoltatore, nell’esaltazione della personalità, della capacità creativa, dell’Arte. Perché l’Arte, come talento che ognuno serba, è un dono che nessun uomo può strappare ad un altro, che nessuno deve sopprimere. Che per sei milioni di volte è svanito nelle sfumate delle ceneri fuoriuscenti dalle camere a gas.
Infine, un’enciclopedia. Infine perché ormai, se si è colto ogni significato che Grossman nasconde in queste righe che non lasciano respiro, si è davvero maturati, e si è davvero in grado, ormai, di avere il titolo di viaggiatori esperti. Viaggiatori nella psiche di uno scrittore ebreo che ha voluto parlare della dignità umana, di quanto sia necessario che nessuno limiti la sfera altrui di personalità. Un’enciclopedia che, voce per voce, spiega in maniera trasversale, il significato di un eccidio come quello compiuto contro gli individui di appartenenza ebraica tra il 1940 e il 1945.
Voce per voce, per arrivare alla G, e cancellare la voce Guerra.
Voce per voce, per arrivare alla A, e rendere dominante la voce Amore.
Amore per la vita, per la speranza, per il talento che ognuno conserva dentro di sé.
Un’opera di impianto magnificente, di un’architettura imponente, decorata da uno stile impeccabile, denso, armato di tutte le armi di cui la penna può disporre quando è capace e consapevole.
Una risposta a domande che non ci si è formulati, e alle quali invece è fondamentale rispondere.
In seguito bisogna munirsi di umiltà, aprire tutti e cinque i sensi all’apprendimento e diventare discepoli di un insegnante che accompagna lungo un percorso profondo, enigmatico, talvolta insidioso, ma infine soddisfacente e di arricchimento personale.
‘Vedi alla voce: amore’ è più di quanto lontano possa esserci da un libro, ‘Vedi alla voce: amore’ è un cammino a tappe volto a far scoprire cosa sia stato quell’evento da tutti conosciuto, da pochi compreso, che ha il nome (errato) di Olocausto, Shoah, Sacrificio; sacrificio di ‘bestie al macello’ messo in atto da una mente e dai suoi corpi esecutori che, credendo nel dislivello della qualità umana, hanno compiuto una strage.
Grossman non compie il solito reportage di quelle immagini che tutti conosciamo di bambini su bambini, corpi su corpi, mostrate dalla televisione e compiante in quell’ipocrita 27 Gennaio in cui ognuno pubblica ‘Se questo è un uomo’ di Primo Levi sul proprio profilo, per poi deridere l’accento del venditore ambulante di colore (chiamato, senza alcun rispetto ‘vucumprà’) il 28 di Gennaio. No, Grossman scava nella psiche di un ebreo, esperto nel rendere l’aspetto più vero, meno ipocrita, meno bisognoso di compassione, di quello che è stato l’omicidio di sei milioni di ebrei; sei milioni di ebrei, ma in fondo l’omicidio di uno per uno di sei milioni di individui, ognuno dotato di una personalità, di un carattere, di affetti ed effetti personali. Non statistica, come la definì Stalin nel suo tragicamente noto aforisma, ma la morte per omicidio di uno a uno di sei milioni di ebrei.
Nel viaggio in compagnia di Grossman si parte bambini con Momik, 9 anni e tante, troppe domande al fronte di poche, troppe poche risposte di quegli adulti che sono genitori ebrei, ma che sono stati deportati e che si sono riusciti a salvare. Ma, salvandosi, non sono riusciti a ricucire del tutto quello che il Terzo Reich, in modo programmatico, sistematico, spietato aveva sfaldato. Urlano nella notte, mangiano come se fosse l’ultimo pasto, scorgono Momik, ma non lo vedono davvero. Cosa sono quei numeri tatuati sul polso? Cosa sono tutti questi misteri sul passato? A produrre il moltiplicarsi delle domande, è l’arrivo del nonno Anshel Wasserman a casa di Momik. Prima di scoprire cosa Wasserman farfuglia, e contro chi si arrabbia nei suoi discorsi incomprensibili sospesi a mezz’aria, bisogna proseguire il viaggio con Momik ormai sposato che incontra Bruno Schulz.
Comprendere il perché dell’introduzione di Bruno Schulz è fondamentale per comprendere il perché Grossman abbia voluto scrivere l’ennesima opera con oggetto: Shoah.
Ridare una morte dignitosa a Schulz, noto scrittore polacco ucciso da un nazista come sfida ad un nazista rivale (‘Ho ucciso il tuo ebreo’ ‘Ora io ucciderò il tuo), significa ridare individualità, dignità personale a tutti quegli ebrei che sono passati alla storia come ‘sei milioni’ e non come ‘uno ad uno’. Schulz viaggia con i salmoni, animali che esprimono la sfida alla difficoltà della vita, per sfuggire agli orrori del nazismo e dell’anti-semitismo.
E con Schulz viaggia anche il lettore sino all’epoca geniale, epoca in cui ognuno torna bambino, e non conosce né male né sofferenze.
Ma la parte più toccante del viaggio, quella che scava più a fondo, quella che provoca lacrime e regala sorrisi, è quella che svela chi è il nonno Wasserman e contro chi farfuglia.
Wasserman farfuglia contro Neigel, Capo del campo di concentramento dove Wasserman è rinchiuso. Neigel, prima di essere un capo SS, è stato un bambino che ha amato le storie che Wasserman pubblicava nella raccolta ‘Ragazzi di Cuore’ e, anziché ucciderlo, gli chiede ancora di narrare. Grazie alle parole di Wasserman, ai suoi racconti mirati, Neigel ricorderà di essere umano, prima ancora che un omicida nazista.
E’ un rapporto forte, solidale, celebrale quello che si instaura tra la vittima e il suo aguzzino, rapporto che si ribalta sino a diventare rapporto tra narratore ed ascoltatore, nell’esaltazione della personalità, della capacità creativa, dell’Arte. Perché l’Arte, come talento che ognuno serba, è un dono che nessun uomo può strappare ad un altro, che nessuno deve sopprimere. Che per sei milioni di volte è svanito nelle sfumate delle ceneri fuoriuscenti dalle camere a gas.
Infine, un’enciclopedia. Infine perché ormai, se si è colto ogni significato che Grossman nasconde in queste righe che non lasciano respiro, si è davvero maturati, e si è davvero in grado, ormai, di avere il titolo di viaggiatori esperti. Viaggiatori nella psiche di uno scrittore ebreo che ha voluto parlare della dignità umana, di quanto sia necessario che nessuno limiti la sfera altrui di personalità. Un’enciclopedia che, voce per voce, spiega in maniera trasversale, il significato di un eccidio come quello compiuto contro gli individui di appartenenza ebraica tra il 1940 e il 1945.
Voce per voce, per arrivare alla G, e cancellare la voce Guerra.
Voce per voce, per arrivare alla A, e rendere dominante la voce Amore.
Amore per la vita, per la speranza, per il talento che ognuno conserva dentro di sé.
Un’opera di impianto magnificente, di un’architettura imponente, decorata da uno stile impeccabile, denso, armato di tutte le armi di cui la penna può disporre quando è capace e consapevole.
Una risposta a domande che non ci si è formulati, e alle quali invece è fondamentale rispondere.
September 21, 2018
Er zijn niet genoeg sterren voor dit boek. Ik heb zo goed als al Grossmans boeken gelezen voor ik aan deze titel begon. En daar ben ik blij om. Want het is bij tijden een doorbijter, maar zoals al zijn boeken: de beloning is zo groot. Het meest wilde en ongetemde boek dat ik ooit las, het meest fantasierijke en geniale. Een boek over de shoah, over de liefde, over het huwelijk, over seks, over kinderen krijgen of net niet, over creëren als de essentie van het leven, maar misschien wel vooral een boek over het schrijven zelf. Neen, laat de 'over' weg, dit boek ís de shoah, liefde, huwelijk, seks, een kind, creëren, leven en schrijven. Na een tijdje had ik het gevoel dat ik geen boek in mijn handen had, maar een kloppend hart, warm en bloederig en trillend van het leven. Een diepe buiging voor David Grossman.
February 7, 2016
Feb. 2016: I've recently revised my rating of this book from 4 t0 5 stars because in thinking over what I've read in the past several years this book -- which I bought when it came out and didn't pick up for over a decade -- turns out to be one that I keep returning to in my mind. That sort of blows me away because it was so difficult to navigate; it's interesting to see how much of it has stayed with me. So, in deference to that, I'm revising my rating. Otherwise, my review is unchanged.
******
This book is just on the verge of being impossible to read. A Mobius strip of narratives, points of view, time sequence, and plot in which it seems essential to the writer that the reader never get completely oriented. So, even though I did want to throw it across the room any number of times for tossing me off the deck into the sea one more time, I gave it four stars. Why?
First, there are a 117 incredible ideas in this book and I would not have missed any one of them (although I'm sure I did!).
What is memory? What is the relationship between memory and identity? What is morality? What is the relationship between love and morality? What is it like to grow up in a world where all the adults share the same memories, yet no one speaks of them to you, even though they are all literally crawling out of their skins with the discomforts their memories bring.
It is also book about the privilege of authorship, the relationship between author and audience and ultimately who "owns" the story being told.
Momik is a little boy, growing up in Jerusalem to his survivor parents. At 10, he recognizes that all the adults in his world have been afflicted by Nazi Beast from Over There. He feels an overwhelming sense of responsibility to free them from the Beast, and, like a child who identifies with Superman, he prepares to do battle against it and save them all. But since no one will speak to him about what this Beast is directly he has resorted to all manner of fabrication and independent research to put together a dim idea of their common enemy -- their own history -- so that he can prepare to do battle against it. But like a child in the midst of the most complicated divorce imaginable the story he has told himself, though not without its poignant emotional accuracies, is wrong and ultimately dangerous.
Momik as an adult then delivers the story of his Grandfather Wasserman, who may of course be his actual grandfather or not, a survivor of the death camps who is dropped off one afternoon at Momik's house by the workers in a sanitorium where he has been staying since the end of the war. Anshel Wasserman, like most of the adult characters in the book, has been driven insane by his war experiences, and having been a popular children's writer before the war, tells the child Momik stories -- inane rambling that Momik alone decides is worth decoding in his quest to understand The Beast.
Wasserman himself survived the death camp by delivering yet another fantastic episode in his once popular series of heroic adventures entitled Children of the Heart beloved by the Nazi guard who detains him, like the Scheherazade from whom he once borrowed a name, but with a twist. Scheherazade told her tale to stay alive. Wasserman will tell his tale night after night, to the eager Nazi guard on the condition that at the end of every evening the guard will attempt to kill him. However, Wasserman unlike so many of the Lambs to the Slaughter around him, has no talent for death. The guard does not succeed and Wasserman lives through the war, and there is a twist there as well.
Of course, the Final Solution proceeds under all the characters feet like some icy cliff; at once the explanation for everything, and nothing, mowing every story under with its cold undertow -- taking with it human dignity, history, love, friendship, beliefs, god and honesty.
Grossman's language is a constant profusion that sputters, quakes and bubbles like a volcano of words spewing in every direction. I am certain that I could read it a hundred times and not read the same book twice. In that sense, it is less a novel than a 450 page narrative poem, and it will take some stamina to read. But if you do so, you will be rewarded. To see any work of art this singular and ambitious, particularly if you are an artist or writer yourself, is to be inspired to delve in wholeheartedly into your grandest plans and most idiosyncratic vision. Audience be damned! Here is what I have to see and say! And yet, I never for a moment felt any sense of contempt from Grossman, merely that he didn't care particularly to be understood or even grasped and somehow that was alright. You have great confidence in where he is taking you page by page. And in each moment, a revelation, a peek under the scrim of life's mad stage. Nonetheless, when I came out of it, I was eager for some solid ground.
******
This book is just on the verge of being impossible to read. A Mobius strip of narratives, points of view, time sequence, and plot in which it seems essential to the writer that the reader never get completely oriented. So, even though I did want to throw it across the room any number of times for tossing me off the deck into the sea one more time, I gave it four stars. Why?
First, there are a 117 incredible ideas in this book and I would not have missed any one of them (although I'm sure I did!).
What is memory? What is the relationship between memory and identity? What is morality? What is the relationship between love and morality? What is it like to grow up in a world where all the adults share the same memories, yet no one speaks of them to you, even though they are all literally crawling out of their skins with the discomforts their memories bring.
It is also book about the privilege of authorship, the relationship between author and audience and ultimately who "owns" the story being told.
Momik is a little boy, growing up in Jerusalem to his survivor parents. At 10, he recognizes that all the adults in his world have been afflicted by Nazi Beast from Over There. He feels an overwhelming sense of responsibility to free them from the Beast, and, like a child who identifies with Superman, he prepares to do battle against it and save them all. But since no one will speak to him about what this Beast is directly he has resorted to all manner of fabrication and independent research to put together a dim idea of their common enemy -- their own history -- so that he can prepare to do battle against it. But like a child in the midst of the most complicated divorce imaginable the story he has told himself, though not without its poignant emotional accuracies, is wrong and ultimately dangerous.
Momik as an adult then delivers the story of his Grandfather Wasserman, who may of course be his actual grandfather or not, a survivor of the death camps who is dropped off one afternoon at Momik's house by the workers in a sanitorium where he has been staying since the end of the war. Anshel Wasserman, like most of the adult characters in the book, has been driven insane by his war experiences, and having been a popular children's writer before the war, tells the child Momik stories -- inane rambling that Momik alone decides is worth decoding in his quest to understand The Beast.
Wasserman himself survived the death camp by delivering yet another fantastic episode in his once popular series of heroic adventures entitled Children of the Heart beloved by the Nazi guard who detains him, like the Scheherazade from whom he once borrowed a name, but with a twist. Scheherazade told her tale to stay alive. Wasserman will tell his tale night after night, to the eager Nazi guard on the condition that at the end of every evening the guard will attempt to kill him. However, Wasserman unlike so many of the Lambs to the Slaughter around him, has no talent for death. The guard does not succeed and Wasserman lives through the war, and there is a twist there as well.
Of course, the Final Solution proceeds under all the characters feet like some icy cliff; at once the explanation for everything, and nothing, mowing every story under with its cold undertow -- taking with it human dignity, history, love, friendship, beliefs, god and honesty.
Grossman's language is a constant profusion that sputters, quakes and bubbles like a volcano of words spewing in every direction. I am certain that I could read it a hundred times and not read the same book twice. In that sense, it is less a novel than a 450 page narrative poem, and it will take some stamina to read. But if you do so, you will be rewarded. To see any work of art this singular and ambitious, particularly if you are an artist or writer yourself, is to be inspired to delve in wholeheartedly into your grandest plans and most idiosyncratic vision. Audience be damned! Here is what I have to see and say! And yet, I never for a moment felt any sense of contempt from Grossman, merely that he didn't care particularly to be understood or even grasped and somehow that was alright. You have great confidence in where he is taking you page by page. And in each moment, a revelation, a peek under the scrim of life's mad stage. Nonetheless, when I came out of it, I was eager for some solid ground.
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May 13, 2017c'um caraças
"Foi o primeiro livro que reli imediatamente do princípio mal acabei de o ler. E desde então quantas vezes o reli! Durante imensos meses não senti necessidade de ler outro livro. Para mim, aquele era o "Livro", no sentido em que o próprio Bruno ansiara: "um volume imenso, sussurrante, uma bíblia agitada, através de cujas páginas o vento soprava devastando-a como uma grande rosa murcha..." e li-o, creio, como o mereceria uma carta perdida: sabendo que o que está escrito nas páginas é menos importante do que aquelas que se perderam ou rasgaram; como aquelas em que é proibido escrever claramente, por receio de poderem ir para a mãos erradas..." (Pág. 131 - 132)
Tenho que pensar e reler...
Cenário da peça teatral - Richard Olmsted
"Foi o primeiro livro que reli imediatamente do princípio mal acabei de o ler. E desde então quantas vezes o reli! Durante imensos meses não senti necessidade de ler outro livro. Para mim, aquele era o "Livro", no sentido em que o próprio Bruno ansiara: "um volume imenso, sussurrante, uma bíblia agitada, através de cujas páginas o vento soprava devastando-a como uma grande rosa murcha..." e li-o, creio, como o mereceria uma carta perdida: sabendo que o que está escrito nas páginas é menos importante do que aquelas que se perderam ou rasgaram; como aquelas em que é proibido escrever claramente, por receio de poderem ir para a mãos erradas..." (Pág. 131 - 132)
Tenho que pensar e reler...
Cenário da peça teatral - Richard Olmsted
December 18, 2007
I read the first 100-page chapter of this book in one stunned sitting the summer my son was born. I don't normally read Holocaust related fiction, but See Under: Love captivated me and tore me up. I lent the book to a dear friend who couldn't get past the opening pages, so I guess it's not for everyone, but for those with a tolerance or liking for magical realism, unusual plotting, and (truly) heartbreaking genius.
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June 5, 2025Dat David Grossman een grootmeester is, staat buiten kijf. Dat het boek onnavolgbaar is, ook. Of ik het onverdeeld graag gelezen heb, is dan weer een geheel andere kwestie ...
January 22, 2011
This book shouldn't hold together as well as it does. So many disparate elements that, to me, shouldn't be attempting to work in cohesion. Child of holocaust survivors/cynical israeli author attempting to write about the holocaust whilst straightening his own life/post modern travails/camp inmate writer going all 1001 and nights on a camp commandant....in a lesser writer's hands this story woulve collapsed into an amorphous mess, falling under the weight ofg tis own ambition. But Grossman succeeds. He details a story that confronts the incomprehensible...and fails. But this failure is part of the mastery. Grossman lays bare so many different facets of holocaust comprehension, the schmaltz, the dire pathos, the shame, the denial, in a way i didnt think possible. Some feat. More so than any israeli author ive read (slightly edging out Amos Oz and leagues ahead of Yehoshua) Grossman presents a story that oddly enough is only incidentally israeli and jewish integrally but not primarily, he gives us a story of humanity...exhausting and draining but beautiful in its pain. Read it.
March 1, 2012
It's difficult to give a book by David Grossman just one star. I thought that his books "Someone to Run With", and "To the End of the Land" were excellent and loved them both. I had a heck of a time following all the different stories within stories in "See Under Love", and had to force myself to finish it. I have this nagging concern that there are ways in which this book trivialized the Holocaust. For well-done books about the Holocaust, "The Book Thief", "Stones from the River", and "Every Man Dies Alone" come to mind. Can't recommend this one.
July 15, 2007
This is awesome. Bruno Schulz is a character. An insane stream of consciousness section. A son of Holocaust survivor imagination-addled masterpiece. Read it in an Holocaust in Fiction class in 1992.
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January 28, 2019Ne ovaj put. Možda nekom drugom prilikom. (I dalje jako volim Davida Grossmana.)
May 2, 2025
And then suddenly, ten pages into the book, I forgot everything and read in breathless excitement, the way you might read a letter smuggled to you over the back roads and byways, a terse communication from the brother you had assumed was dead all these years. It was the first time 1 ever began to reread a book as soon as I finished it. And I've read it a good many times since. For months it was the only book I needed. It was The Book for me in the sense Bruno had yearned for that great tome, sighing, a stormy Bible, its pages fluttering in the wind like an overblown rose—and I believe I read it as such a letter deserves to be read: knowing that what is written on the page is less significant than the pages torn out and lost; pages so explicit they were expunged for fear that they would fall into the wrong hands ...
See Under - Love (1989) is Betsy Rosenberg's translation of Ayen Erekh: 'Ahavah' (1986) by David Grossman.
This is an ambitious and highly impressive, if demanding, novel, split into four sections “Momik”, “Bruno”, “Wasserman”, and “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s life”. with very distinct styles, essentially novellas in their own right (the first three c100 pages in length and the last 150).
This encyclopedia.com entry explains the novel's complex structure well.
Really the only reason for it not getting 5 stars from me is that for me, as I suspect for many readers, some sections work better than others, depending more on personal taste than merit. So for me the surreal Bruno Schulz inspired section worked better than the initial story set in 1958-9 Jerusalem, with a nine year old child trying to understand hushed references to 'the Nazi Beast' and 'over there' which was more conventional in nature, at least with respect to what's come since if not before.
Think about him for my sake, be inventive, make up a story, think Bruno, say Bruno, for my sake, dearest, for your sake and mine...
Very well. I will tell you. Only you'll be sorry you ever asked.
Now listen.
You mentioned how hard it was for him to laugh, and I'll tell you about his fears. About the loneliness his character and talent ordained for him. There was the fear of the bonds of love and friendship, the fear of the abyss between one minute and the next, and of what he would discover on the page after it was touched by his magical magnetic pen, which sucked up the magma of ancient truth, that rose steadily upward through layers of caution and self-defense—and then he would stop and scream in fear, because what he had written seemed to come from someone else, and he began to suspect that he, too, formed the weak link through which irresistible human longings burst forth into the world, and then my Bruno stood up and paced around the room, taunting himself that he was suffering from megalomania, and had lost the ability to distinguish berween his real life and his stories, and that through a nyedoenga, like him, a shlimazel, only abstract essences of preposterous errors and blunders— could possibly—
See Under - Love (1989) is Betsy Rosenberg's translation of Ayen Erekh: 'Ahavah' (1986) by David Grossman.
This is an ambitious and highly impressive, if demanding, novel, split into four sections “Momik”, “Bruno”, “Wasserman”, and “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s life”. with very distinct styles, essentially novellas in their own right (the first three c100 pages in length and the last 150).
This encyclopedia.com entry explains the novel's complex structure well.
Really the only reason for it not getting 5 stars from me is that for me, as I suspect for many readers, some sections work better than others, depending more on personal taste than merit. So for me the surreal Bruno Schulz inspired section worked better than the initial story set in 1958-9 Jerusalem, with a nine year old child trying to understand hushed references to 'the Nazi Beast' and 'over there' which was more conventional in nature, at least with respect to what's come since if not before.
Think about him for my sake, be inventive, make up a story, think Bruno, say Bruno, for my sake, dearest, for your sake and mine...
Very well. I will tell you. Only you'll be sorry you ever asked.
Now listen.
You mentioned how hard it was for him to laugh, and I'll tell you about his fears. About the loneliness his character and talent ordained for him. There was the fear of the bonds of love and friendship, the fear of the abyss between one minute and the next, and of what he would discover on the page after it was touched by his magical magnetic pen, which sucked up the magma of ancient truth, that rose steadily upward through layers of caution and self-defense—and then he would stop and scream in fear, because what he had written seemed to come from someone else, and he began to suspect that he, too, formed the weak link through which irresistible human longings burst forth into the world, and then my Bruno stood up and paced around the room, taunting himself that he was suffering from megalomania, and had lost the ability to distinguish berween his real life and his stories, and that through a nyedoenga, like him, a shlimazel, only abstract essences of preposterous errors and blunders— could possibly—
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December 4, 2021neprisijaukinau. Pirmas skyrius, apie žvėries auginimą, labai patiko. Antrasis apie jūrą buvo įdomus pirmuosius puslapius, bet vėliau pabodo ir nebaigiau skaityti.
July 5, 2007
A tough book to read, divided in a few parts, each different from the rest. The isuue is one that interests me personally as well: the first generation in Israel, second to the holocaust.
February 17, 2015
Diferente de tudo o que já li sobre o Holocausto.
May 3, 2021
„Ir visi mes meldėmės vieno dalyko: kad jis nugyventų nesužinojęs apie karą. Suprantate, here Neigeli? Prašėme nedaug: kad vienas žmogus pasaulyje nugyventų nuo gimimo iki mirties ir nieko nežinotų apie karą.”
Man buvo be galo įdomu susipažinti su vienu garsiausių šiuolaikinių Izraelio rašytoju David Grossman, apdovanotu už nuopelnus literatūrai ir poezijai. Lietuvos skaitytojams šis autorius jau pažįstamas iš knygos „Užeina kartą arklys į barą”.
Pirmiausia, atkreipiau dėmesį, kad originalo kalba, pirmą kartą ši knyga buvo išleista 1989 metais. Romanas sudarytas iš keturių dalių, kurios ganėtinai skiriasi stilistiškai, tačiau visas jungia pagrindinis veikėjas Momikas – Šlomo Efraimas Neumanas (Šleimelė) ir Holokausto kontekstas.
Pirmojoje dalyje pasakojama apie devynmetį Momiką, kuris atranda Nacių žvėrį. Antrojoje peršokama į Dancigo uostą ir pasakojama apie rašytoją Bruną Šulcą, kuris žuvo nuo nacių rankos. Trečiojoje dalyje veiksmas vyksta koncentracijos stovykloje, kurioje senelis (dėdė) Anšelis Vasermanas nacių karininkui Neigeliui pasakoja senstančių Širdžių vaikų draugijos nuotykius. Paskutinė dalis – „Išsami Kaziko gyvenimo enciklopedija”, iš kurios ir paaiškėja knygos pavadinimo prasmė.
Rašymo stilius filosofiškas, painus, fantasmagoriškas, keistas ir trikdantis, tačiau kartu poetiškas, liūdnas ir jautrus. Ir nors šis kūrinys tikrai ne kiekvienam (kaip ten sakoma: kas tinka visiems – netinka niekam), tikiu, kad jis atras savo skaitytoją. Tik patarimas: neužstrikite ties antra dalimi „Bruno”, nes man ji buvo tikras iššūkis, tačiau labai džiaugiuosi, kad jį įveikiau ir perskaičiau visą knygą.
Ir nors pirmojo knygos leidimo metu Holokausto tema dar nebuvo tokia madinga, tai tikrai nėra dar vienas romanas apie jį. Kai kurie epizodai iš tiesų istoriškai tikslūs, tačiau dažnai nepaisoma laiko, erdvės ir logikos ribų. Mano manymu, čia svarbiau pati kūryba kaip priemonė ir jos išreiškimo būdai, nei istoriniai faktai. Tikėjimas, jog kuriančioji galia stipresnė už naikinančią Holokausto jėgą. Ir išlikusi viltis „užkrėsti” žmoniją humaniškumu.
Daugiau mano perskaitytų knygų: www.profesionalimama.com
Man buvo be galo įdomu susipažinti su vienu garsiausių šiuolaikinių Izraelio rašytoju David Grossman, apdovanotu už nuopelnus literatūrai ir poezijai. Lietuvos skaitytojams šis autorius jau pažįstamas iš knygos „Užeina kartą arklys į barą”.
Pirmiausia, atkreipiau dėmesį, kad originalo kalba, pirmą kartą ši knyga buvo išleista 1989 metais. Romanas sudarytas iš keturių dalių, kurios ganėtinai skiriasi stilistiškai, tačiau visas jungia pagrindinis veikėjas Momikas – Šlomo Efraimas Neumanas (Šleimelė) ir Holokausto kontekstas.
Pirmojoje dalyje pasakojama apie devynmetį Momiką, kuris atranda Nacių žvėrį. Antrojoje peršokama į Dancigo uostą ir pasakojama apie rašytoją Bruną Šulcą, kuris žuvo nuo nacių rankos. Trečiojoje dalyje veiksmas vyksta koncentracijos stovykloje, kurioje senelis (dėdė) Anšelis Vasermanas nacių karininkui Neigeliui pasakoja senstančių Širdžių vaikų draugijos nuotykius. Paskutinė dalis – „Išsami Kaziko gyvenimo enciklopedija”, iš kurios ir paaiškėja knygos pavadinimo prasmė.
Rašymo stilius filosofiškas, painus, fantasmagoriškas, keistas ir trikdantis, tačiau kartu poetiškas, liūdnas ir jautrus. Ir nors šis kūrinys tikrai ne kiekvienam (kaip ten sakoma: kas tinka visiems – netinka niekam), tikiu, kad jis atras savo skaitytoją. Tik patarimas: neužstrikite ties antra dalimi „Bruno”, nes man ji buvo tikras iššūkis, tačiau labai džiaugiuosi, kad jį įveikiau ir perskaičiau visą knygą.
Ir nors pirmojo knygos leidimo metu Holokausto tema dar nebuvo tokia madinga, tai tikrai nėra dar vienas romanas apie jį. Kai kurie epizodai iš tiesų istoriškai tikslūs, tačiau dažnai nepaisoma laiko, erdvės ir logikos ribų. Mano manymu, čia svarbiau pati kūryba kaip priemonė ir jos išreiškimo būdai, nei istoriniai faktai. Tikėjimas, jog kuriančioji galia stipresnė už naikinančią Holokausto jėgą. Ir išlikusi viltis „užkrėsti” žmoniją humaniškumu.
Daugiau mano perskaitytų knygų: www.profesionalimama.com
February 25, 2024
It’s hard for me to capture how stunning I found this book, both as a literary experience and an emotional one.
The protagonist, Momik, is the only child of Holocaust survivors. In the opening section, he attempts to understand what could have happened “Over There” that made his parents the way they are. He’s a deeply sensitive child, one who wants to make the traumatized adults around him happy at any cost.
In the next section, we encounter Momik as an adult writer, one who can’t help but see the pain and devastation waiting around every corner. He���s resigned himself to inevitable destruction. We also get a phenomenal battle of stories with the ocean, and Bruno Schultz’s escape from Drohobyz and transformation into a salmon.
The next two sections were, for me, breathtaking, as the novel essentially becomes a nesting doll of stories. Momik begins to write the tale of his ancestor Anshel Wasserman, a children’s author who, unable to be killed in his concentration camp, is enlisted to tell stories to the camp commandant, Herr Neigel. He resurrects his characters The Children of the Heart, while Momik pulls figures in from his real world.
The way the book’s four sections built onto each other, jumping around through space and time, in and out of reality, never felt performative or gimmicky. Instead, they felt like four different ways of attempting to tell the same story; how to talk about the depths of inhumanity and suffering? To see Wasserman use stories to try to coax Neigel back toward humanity… it was incredibly moving. Grossman’s imagination is immense, to have written something as daring, expansive, and ever-changing as this.
I’m going to be thinking about this book and what it means for my own humanity for a long, long time.
The protagonist, Momik, is the only child of Holocaust survivors. In the opening section, he attempts to understand what could have happened “Over There” that made his parents the way they are. He’s a deeply sensitive child, one who wants to make the traumatized adults around him happy at any cost.
In the next section, we encounter Momik as an adult writer, one who can’t help but see the pain and devastation waiting around every corner. He���s resigned himself to inevitable destruction. We also get a phenomenal battle of stories with the ocean, and Bruno Schultz’s escape from Drohobyz and transformation into a salmon.
The next two sections were, for me, breathtaking, as the novel essentially becomes a nesting doll of stories. Momik begins to write the tale of his ancestor Anshel Wasserman, a children’s author who, unable to be killed in his concentration camp, is enlisted to tell stories to the camp commandant, Herr Neigel. He resurrects his characters The Children of the Heart, while Momik pulls figures in from his real world.
The way the book’s four sections built onto each other, jumping around through space and time, in and out of reality, never felt performative or gimmicky. Instead, they felt like four different ways of attempting to tell the same story; how to talk about the depths of inhumanity and suffering? To see Wasserman use stories to try to coax Neigel back toward humanity… it was incredibly moving. Grossman’s imagination is immense, to have written something as daring, expansive, and ever-changing as this.
I’m going to be thinking about this book and what it means for my own humanity for a long, long time.
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April 22, 2022La prima parte del libro devo dire che mi era anche piaciuta. La storia del piccolo Momick che indaga, come un piccolo investigatore per scoprire cosa sia la "bestia nazista" e "quel posto li" di cui sente cosi spesso parlare era interessante e scritta anche in maniera pregevole. Ma già la seconda parte è di una noia terribile. Mi scusi il signor Grossman ma mi è sembrata un puro esercizio di stile, uno sbrodolamento manieristico davvero stucchevole.
Mi ha fatto passare la voglia di saper come va a finire, e per uno come me, fissato con i finali e che non chiude un libro se non lo ha finito, è piuttosto seria la cosa.
Magari era solo il libro sbagliato al momento sbagliato e dovrò ricredermi, ma per ora lo abbandono senza troppe remore.
Mi ha fatto passare la voglia di saper come va a finire, e per uno come me, fissato con i finali e che non chiude un libro se non lo ha finito, è piuttosto seria la cosa.
Magari era solo il libro sbagliato al momento sbagliato e dovrò ricredermi, ma per ora lo abbandono senza troppe remore.
April 21, 2023
Another David Grossman read and loved. First and third sections are brilliant. Second and last a little less than brilliant. Is it weird to wish this had a better title to get more people into it? He’s a criminally underrated author. Will attempt to read the rest of his catalogue this year.
4.5 ⭐️
4.5 ⭐️
July 23, 2024
Wielka powieść o sile opowiadania. Ale tym samym nie zawsze łatwa. Autor bezczelnie i bez żadnych skrupułów pogrywa sobie z czytelnikiem i jeszcze nie wiem, czy to tej książce ujmuje, czy wręcz przeciwnie.
Jedno jest jednak pewne - pierwsza część to arcydzieło i choćby dla tych kilkudziesięciu stron warto po tę książkę sięgnąć.
Jedno jest jednak pewne - pierwsza część to arcydzieło i choćby dla tych kilkudziesięciu stron warto po tę książkę sięgnąć.
March 14, 2016
Some of the great lines I took note of while reading this book:
-He fears only the great searchlights that converge inside and chstise him to be-like-everybody-else, to live the gray life he can never redeem with a touch of his pen.
- in the books he read he sought the one phrase, the pearl, which launched the writer on a voyage hundreds of pages long.
-I want to write, but I can't get rid of my blocks and inhibitions. Every step becomes impossible because of the half step that must precede it.
-A poem is like a love affair ... a novel is more like marriage: you stay with your characters long after the initial passion has worn off.
- They're human beings all, and therefore creators. They're doomed to be. They're compelled to be by virtue of their origins - to create their own life, their love and hatred and freedom and poetry; we are all artists ... only some of us have forgotten that, and others prefer to ignore it out of some enigmatic fear and there are those who understand it only on their deathbed, while others... don't understand it even then.
-all stories are cut from the same cloth except that sometimes you have to push the stone uphill and other times you yourself are the cumbersome stone.
-He felt this way because he had a great respect for life and refused to believe in the drafts his own life constantly tried to push into his hands.
-The written pages in his hands are like a fresh leaf sprouting from a withered tree.
-...said humor was the sole means to understand God and His Creation and to go on worshipping Him in gladness.
-In Wasserman's view we are all duty-bound to renew the moral validity of our decisions for as long as we act upon them.
-You stole my story! You stole my life!
-He fears only the great searchlights that converge inside and chstise him to be-like-everybody-else, to live the gray life he can never redeem with a touch of his pen.
- in the books he read he sought the one phrase, the pearl, which launched the writer on a voyage hundreds of pages long.
-I want to write, but I can't get rid of my blocks and inhibitions. Every step becomes impossible because of the half step that must precede it.
-A poem is like a love affair ... a novel is more like marriage: you stay with your characters long after the initial passion has worn off.
- They're human beings all, and therefore creators. They're doomed to be. They're compelled to be by virtue of their origins - to create their own life, their love and hatred and freedom and poetry; we are all artists ... only some of us have forgotten that, and others prefer to ignore it out of some enigmatic fear and there are those who understand it only on their deathbed, while others... don't understand it even then.
-all stories are cut from the same cloth except that sometimes you have to push the stone uphill and other times you yourself are the cumbersome stone.
-He felt this way because he had a great respect for life and refused to believe in the drafts his own life constantly tried to push into his hands.
-The written pages in his hands are like a fresh leaf sprouting from a withered tree.
-...said humor was the sole means to understand God and His Creation and to go on worshipping Him in gladness.
-In Wasserman's view we are all duty-bound to renew the moral validity of our decisions for as long as we act upon them.
-You stole my story! You stole my life!
January 16, 2018
Se non siete pronti , non leggetelo , se non avete pazienza se le trame intricate e la metrica particolare non vi esalta , lasciate perdere . L’ho finito oggi , ci sono stata parecchio e sono sconvolta dal modo di Grossman di raccontarci un evento che ha scosso le coscienze di tutto il mondo . L’ olocausto, l’eccidio di milioni di ebrei . Si parte da un bambino di nove anni Momik che non ha risposte alle sue domande, da due genitori troppi assenti . Due genitori ,sopravvissuti . Quei numeri tatuati sul polso , quel modo di mangiare come se fosse l’ultimo pasto . Da grande Momik vuole fare lo scrittore ,così risponde ,e ripercorre tutti i posti dove è accaduto la carneficina,conosce la belva Nazista . Ripercorre tutto attraverso uno scrittore polacco ucciso da un soldato delle s.s. Bruno Shultz gli rida dignità , facendolo rivivere In mare assieme ad un gruppo di salmoni , simbolo della lotta contro le avversità della vita . E per ultimo è non di importanza il capitolo dedicato al nonno Wasserman scrittore , rinchiuso in un campo di concentramento , che non riesce a morire e gli sarà data un possibilità dal comandante Neigel che riconosce in lui lo scrittore della sua infanzia e gli chiede di raccontargli il seguito di un suo romanzo I Ragazzi di Cuore . E attraverso queste vicende il comandante riconoscerà di essere umano e non solo una belva Nazista . Il tutto si chiude con un enciclopedia che voce per voce , spiega questa piaga che l’umanità ha conosciuto . Un’enciclopedia che va dalla A come amore e alla lettera G cancellare la voce Guerra . “abbiamo chiesto così poco : che sia possibile che un uomo viva in questo mondo tutta la sua vita , dal principio alla fine , senza mai conoscere la guerra “
August 11, 2017
Non è stata per nulla una lettura facile, per me. Quando ho iniziato questo libro avevo in mente Qualcuno con cui correre, che avevo letto anni fa e mi era piaciuto molto. E' stata un'esperienza totalmente diversa. Un libro non facile, innanzitutto; che segue una cronologia degli eventi difficoltosa, che spazia tra il reale, il concreto e l'assolutamente fantastico in maniera forse confusionaria, talvolta. Alcune pagine si "deglutiscono" davvero a fatica. E muoversi tra le vicende di Momik, di Bruno Schulz (un capitolo che appare completamente scollegato dal resto del libro e che viene naturale considerare poco sensato se notiamo che si tratta di un viaggio immaginario di un umano con un branco di salmoni, sì, proprio così. Interessante però il saggio finale per conoscere meglio la figura di Schulz), di Wasserman e dei Ragazzi di Cuore è una vera sfida rivolta al lettore, con un pizzico di ottimismo di troppo. Spiegare la Shoah a un pubblico probabilmente non solo adulto diventa più un modo per incasinare la Storia, che per dipanarla. Il romanzo ha comunque anche diverse cose positive, tra tutte il racconto del rapporto tra Wasserman e Neigel, che rende oltremodo umano uno spietato comandante di un Lager.
July 24, 2008
there is lots of literature on the holocaust but this is by far my favorite holocaust representation. it is so, so impressive. mostly I say this because of the first section (there are four total), which is an 80-page story about a little boy named Momik. you could totally read this part without reading the rest of the book - it stands alone, and is just plain GOOD in that breathtaking way that short pieces sometimes are. the second section is very challenging to read and makes very little sense, so be forewarned. however, it's worth the struggle, and the final two sections make up for having to endure this wordy and confusing narrative because they are written in coherent language and a more traditional story-form. the characters anshel (a jew in a concentration camp) and neigel (a nazi general) and the relationship they form are Unforgettable with a capital U. if you have the choice to read this book or read "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer, the choice is easy, read this one and don't look back.
March 8, 2012
Ik geef het op. Ik heb me door deel I geworsteld, ik raakte verstrikt in deel II en besloot het over te slaan. Ik ben begonnen aan deel III maar vandaag is de kogel door de kerk: ik stop ermee. Hoe vreselijk ik het ook vind om een boek niet uit te lezen, na meer dan een maand worstelen is het goed geweest, ik geef me over. Dit boek is duidelijk niet voor mij geschreven.
Het eerste deel gaat over Momik, de verteller in deel 2 en 3. In deel 2 springt de ik-persoon van de hak-op-de-tak in een verhaal dat steeds onwaarschijnlijker wordt en de verwarring is groot. Misschien moet dit zijn gemoedstoestand weergeven maar voor mij was het onverteerbaar.
Deel 3 gaat over de opa van Momik die al in deel 1 zijn opwachting maakte en begint al even bizar als deel 2. Deel 4 is een soort van glossarium van woorden die in verband staan met een bepaald personage waarvan ik door mijn vroegtijdig stoppen, gespaard ben gebleven.
Zo mooi als ik 'Een vrouw op de vlucht voor een bericht' gevonden heb, zo vreselijk vond ik dit.
Het eerste deel gaat over Momik, de verteller in deel 2 en 3. In deel 2 springt de ik-persoon van de hak-op-de-tak in een verhaal dat steeds onwaarschijnlijker wordt en de verwarring is groot. Misschien moet dit zijn gemoedstoestand weergeven maar voor mij was het onverteerbaar.
Deel 3 gaat over de opa van Momik die al in deel 1 zijn opwachting maakte en begint al even bizar als deel 2. Deel 4 is een soort van glossarium van woorden die in verband staan met een bepaald personage waarvan ik door mijn vroegtijdig stoppen, gespaard ben gebleven.
Zo mooi als ik 'Een vrouw op de vlucht voor een bericht' gevonden heb, zo vreselijk vond ik dit.
November 5, 2021
In this powerful novel by one of Israel’s most prominent writers, Momik, the only child of Holocaust survivors, grows up in the shadow of his parents’ history. Determined to exorcise the Nazi “beast” from their shattered lives and prepare for a second holocaust he knows is coming, Momik increasingly shields himself from all feeling and attachment. But through the stories his great-uncle tells him—the same stories he told the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp—Momik, too, becomes “infected with humanity.” Grossman’s masterly fusing of vision, thought, and emotion make See Under: Love a luminously imaginative and profoundly affecting work.
This book was incredibly written, painful, powerful - one of the best i had ever read.
This book was incredibly written, painful, powerful - one of the best i had ever read.
September 11, 2012
This was a real trudge for me. I gave it three stars because there were aspects of it that I found really interesting. My favorite part of the book was definitely the first section - it was downhill from there but the last section was very good as well. This book is a translation and I thought that was done extremely well too. But there were parts of it that really dragged for me - whole sections even.
May 14, 2018
Táto kniha je úplne iný level, než väčšina kníh, s ktorými som sa doteraz stretla. Hovoriť o obsahu nie je podstatné, no dá sa povedať, že rovnako obsahom i formou autor ponúka čitateľovi neskutočne fascinujúce, i keď na druhej strane aj náročné čítanie, ktoré uspokojí tých, ktorí hľadajú v knihách stále niečo nové, nevšedné a neuspokoja sa so šedým priemerom (či už po formálnej alebo obsahovej stránke). Nevšedný pohľad na tému holocaustu očami malého chlapca.
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