Falling Out of Time

Starred review from January 27, 2014
Although it’s identified as a novel, this searing narrative from Israeli writer Grossman is not cast in traditional form. A mixture of free-verse, prose, and stage directions, it’s a searching cri de coeur—an impassioned exploration of existential questions about life and death. In Grossman’s previous novel, To the End of the Land, a son is lost in battle; while Grossman was writing that book, his own son was killed in Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon. Here, a bereaved father, who, after five years, still cannot come to terms with his son’s death, leaves his wife and home to try to find the “there,” where the boy’s soul resides. As he relentlessly walks through and around his village, the Walking Man is joined by others who have lost their children. His voice—intense, anguished, almost deranged by grief—is mediated by the Town Chronicler, who also introduces the voices of the other seekers—the net mender, the midwife, the duke, the cobbler, the math teacher, the centaur—who join the Walking Man. In hoping to be granted even a moment of communication with the dead, the Walking Man laments “the vast expanse his death/ created in me,” and his need to embrace “this/ lonely/ dead/ child.” This piercingly sad elegy culminates in a moment of peace in which the community of the bereaved contemplates the cycle of life and death. The precision and sensory depth of Grossman’s language renders this unconventional work an unforgettable and magnificent document of suffering.

February 1, 2014
A genre-crossing, pensive, peripatetic novel by Israeli author Grossman (To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.). Grossman's previous novel described a walk across the scorching Judean desert in quest of peace. The walking continues in this book, a blend of verse, drama and prose that recalls Karl Kraus' blistering Last Days of Mankind (1919) in both subject and form. Where Kraus described the self-immolation of Europe in World War I, Grossman ponders a world in which "[c]old flames lapped around us," a world caught up in formless, chaotic conflict about which we know only a few things--especially that people, young people, have died. The "Walking Man" goes in quest of the lost, but, leaving his home and village, he manages only to encircle it in an ever-widening ambit. Says "The Woman," "You /circle / around me / like a beast / of prey," but he is searching, not hunting, his circling an apparent effort at exhaustiveness. Others join him, the predator-prey metaphor working overtime: One woman likens her spirit to "a half-devoured beast / in its predator's mouth." In the end, Kraus gives way to a modernist verse reminiscent of Eliot: "We walk in gloom. / Across the way, on gnarled rock, / a spider spins a web, spreads out his taut, / clear net." The lesson learned from such observations? Perhaps this: Though death is final, the fact of death continues to reverberate among the living, awed and heartbroken. Rich, lyrical, philosophically dense--not an easy work to take in but one that repays every effort.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2014
With a strange and wonderful tale, Grossman challenges the boundaries separating life from death, sanity from madness. Announcing I have to go, a grief-stricken Israeli villager takes leave of his bewildered wife, embarking on a journey to therean impossibly undefined place where he hopes to find and to speak with his dead son. As he sets out walking, in ever-widening circles around his village, the Walking Man becomes a Pied Piper of Bereavement, drawing behind him the Midwife, the Net-Mender, the Elderly Math Teacher, the Dukeall staggering under loads of sadness due to the loss of a loved one. Even the Town Chroniclerwho narrates the bizarre questjoins his distraught wife in the company following the Walking Man into a dreamscape where the deepest fears stirred by death collide with the most passionate hopes for life. Together these grim marchers unfold a dark colloquyby turns heartrending and comfortingon what it means to love the departed, what it means to acceptor defydeath. Intensifying the pathos, deepening the soul-searching, husbands and wives repeatedly struggle to preserve their union despite sharply contrasting ways of dealing with their shared loss. A potent fusion of poetry, fiction, and drama sweeps readers into very deep waters!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2013

Blending prose and drama and reading like a fable--the main character here is called Walking Man, and other characters include the Net Mender, the Midwife, and the Elderly Math Teacher--this new work from multi-award-winning Israeli novelist Grossman investigates grief, solace, and the finality of death. The novel opens with Walking Man informing his wife that he is departing to search for their dead son, then traveling in expanding circles around the town as others join him to reflect on their own losses. While Grossman's recent, triumphant To the End of the Land addresses such issues within a detailed and realistic frame, this brief novel works through Chagall-like luminosity.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2014

Shortly before publication of Grossman's recent To the End of the Land, which explores the emotional strains a family endures when a loved one is sent off to war, Grossman's younger son was killed in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, or Second Lebanon War. Here, the author responds by examining aspects of silent and hidden mourning. Utilizing a variety of literary genres, each of which illuminates a means of releasing trauma and grief, he intertwines the lives of several nameless characters, among them the Walking Man, the Net Mender, the Midwife, and the Elderly Math Teacher, who have experienced the loss of a child. Each person carries a concealed burden, yearning for an overt articulation of their loss. It is through the discovery of their collective voice, written in poetic verse, that each character is able to unearth the covered traces of trauma and find closure. VERDICT Grossman's lyrical approach to the silent suffering of mourning is both a literary study in processing grief and a reminder that healing often comes through the action of putting into words the pain we thought was unspeakable. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.