Summer Jackets:
Our
hadow Life
hen I was in graduate school, the late Joseph Brodsky taught a class in which he required his students to memorize each poem that he assigned. There was something both old-fashioned and scary about that. Looking back, that's probably why I didn't take the class.
Nevertheless, I saw its disorienting effects. People wandered the halls in a daze, moving their lips. Some huddled together and recited to each other. Others formed a kind of improvisational class to act out lines or dance to the metre. But as the semester wore on Brod-sky's students became absolutely giddy over their unrestricted access to the poets they studied.
Those poems will always belong to my fellow students, who achieved a permanent state of reading, experiencing the thrill of what the literary critic Sven Birkerts calls a "shadow life." This shadow life resonates most after a book is returned to the shelf. One of the purest examples of someone who lives the shadow life of a reader is my two-year-old daughter. For her the act of reading is still pure resonance. She recognizes the cover of her favorite book and retreats to the shady zone of word sounds and story sequence. "I read," she declares proudly. And she does, by dipping into a metaphoric well where image and memory and passion come together in an intoxicating brew.
Before there were books there was the designated reader who either entertained or educated the illiterate majority. (I like to think of book reviewing as a direct descendant of that medieval practice.) Gutenberg's press changed all of that by facilitating the wide distribution of books. Gutenberg could not possibly have imagined the ways his invention would change the world. The notable decline in illiteracy led to a number of historical phenomena, including democratization and secularization. All of that happened because people learned how to read.
Now we're surfing the World Wide Web. Are we on the brink of another seismic shift in our reading lives? Many social and literary critics already see bound books strewn along the side of the information superhighway, tire tracks streaked across their covers. In this atmosphere, assembling a summer reading issue may be an act of faith. But in my experience a faithfial act can never become obsolete like a computer program. It is as timeless as reading itself
I predict that the printed page will always be with us. An English professor of mine once attempted to enliven a literature survey course by comparing the excitement of reading to looking at a partially clad body. His point was that human beings have an intrinsic need to visualize by imagining. So I've stopped worrying about CD-ROMS and books on tape. To update the metaphor: virtual reading is like virtual sex. Neither is as challenging or as passionate as the real thing.
ijook reviews, positive or negative, create midrashic spaces. The following pages iniended to create a shadow Hie for readers to retreat to when the temperature rises.
JUDITH BOLTON-FASMAN BOOKS EDITOR
FICTION
'Open Heart'
ByA.B.Yehoshua
Doubleday, 498pgs., $24.95 US.
Capturing the long-held Israeli fascination with treks to exotic places, internationally acclaimed Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua transport? readers to India in his fifth novel. Open Heart.
With its emphasis on Eastern religion and philosophy, this richly detailed novel breaks with Mr. Yehoshua's earlier works, which feature Israeli Jews confi-onting personal issues against the backdrop of Jewish history and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Rejected fi-om a coveted surgical residency at a Tel Aviv hospital, protagonist Dr. Benjamin Rubin is suddenly chosen by the hospital's chief administrator to help him bring home his hepatitis-stricken daughter fix)m a remote village in India. Readers journey alongside Dr. Rubin as he experiences the exotic sights, sounds and smells of India and are drawn into the doctor's philosophical inquiry about birth, death and the transmigration of souls.
During the trip, the doctor, Benjy, falls in love both with
the rivers of hidia and with Dori, the administrator's middle-aged wife. Back in Israel and obsessed with Dori, Benjy decides to marry in order to continue the affair without attracting suspicion. He hastily weds free-spirited Michaela, who has traveled widely in India, is deeply steeped in Eastern philosophy and apparently is un-bothered by Benjy's lack of love for her.
Benjy's search for inner happiness is elusive. Following the administrator's death after bypass surgery, both women in his life reject and abandon him; Dori goes off to Europe and Michaela takes his infant daughter to India. The new hospital administrator relieves him of his part-time staff position.
Mr. Yehoshua's foray into the world of Eastern religion symbolizes Israeli society's turning outward after years of isolation and insularity. His character's unsuccessful search for fiilfillment in the mysteries of the East, rather thein in his own rich Jewish heritage, is disturbing and poses one of the fundamental challenges of the peace process: Must Israel's freedom from conflict with its neighbors translate into a wholesale rejection of Jewish history and tradition?
— Bluma Zuckerbrot-Finkelatein
'Hang Time'
By Zev Chafets
Warner Books, 305pgs., $21.95 US.
Blurring the lines between fact and fiction and uniting the disparate worlds of NBA basketball and Middle Eastern terrorism, Zev Chafets weaves an engaging, fast-paced thriller in Hang Time.