PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...translated smoothly from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman ... If this book lacks the urgency of earlier Yehoshua novels...it’s not only understandable, it’s maybe inevitable given the subject ... It’s hard not to read the atrophy in Zvi’s frontal lobe as a kind of metaphor for the current stagnation of Israeli society. Years of near-constant violence, not to mention multiple terms of Benjamin Netanyahu, would exhaust anybody. At one point, Shibbolet compares Netanyahu directly to the manipulative and subservient King Herod. As Herod was to Rome, he says, Bibi is to the White House. Tellingly, as Zvi’s dementia worsens, he can find his way back to the apartment in Tel Aviv only by using the Yitzhak Rabin memorial, site of the assassination, as a landmark, a direction home ... I found great beauty, not answers, in Zvi’s essential human decency. Rather than retreat inward and hide, he chooses — yes — to live. In Early in the Summer of 1970, Yehoshua wrote, \'Heavily does this fearful land seize me by the neck.\' In this novel, when asked if he believes in his country, Zvi answers: \'Do I have a choice?\'
Nicole Krauss
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt might be tempting to conflate the character Nicole with the author named on the book jacket. But Krauss — like W. G. Sebald, whose work haunts these pages, and like many other writers before her — toys with identity as a means to lure us into a story (or two), and not, to my mind, to reveal intimate details ... Forest Dark is a novel that, mercifully, embraces and even celebrates not, for once, having answers ... And yet, and yet. What about doing some honor to the truth of incoherence? Krauss manages it by granting two high-achieving American Jews — why Jews? people, vulnerable human beings — a break from themselves. Israel, impossible and messy as it is, becomes a conduit for new possibilities. Detours. Blessed dead ends ... Elias Canetti once wrote of Kafka that he sought, above all, to preserve his freedom to fail. In this spirit, Krauss, an incisive and creative interpreter of Kafka, allows Nicole and Epstein to regain their own freedom to fail. This particular freedom should never be taken lightly. It’s a great gift not only to her characters, but to her readers.
