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4.67 AVERAGE
4.67 AVERAGE
4.5 stars
I don't understand why in his lifetime Sukenick insisted on truth in his fiction. Sure he uses autobiographical detail, such as snippets of tape recordings of conversations with his parents and including real life author friends Raymond Federman and Serge Doubrovsky and giving them a right of reply within the novel about being included in the novel! But for all this true life, why then resort to postmodern style and structure of a novel whose very artifice undermines any notions of 'truth as truth.
He's not attempting to write a memoir or an autobiography, as witnessed by a childhood comic-book hero fantasy section with him as part of a bomber crew in WW2, with teenage romantic crush as the co-pilot and a crew member who keeps dying and yet returning for the next mission - part Catch 22 and part South Park's "You killed Kenny". Or the pun-tastic stand-up comedy routine of the penultimate section, or the Maltese Falconesque noir final section chasing a stolen antiquity, a gold statuette of the Golden Calf, that alternative idol forged by a restive Jewish population waiting in the desert for the return of Moses from Mount Sinai and doubting the Jewish god accordingly.
'Mosaic Man' -a brilliant double-edged title, of a man built up in fragments like a mosaic, but also a man of Moses, that is a Jew. For this is Sukenick's inquiry into the nature of his Jewish identity. So we get sections set in Le Pen's France, Solidarity era Poland where the failing Communist regime resort to anti-Semitism as a rallying cry/scapegoating, even though there are virtually no Jews left in Poland; the ghosts of the original Jewish ghetto in 16th century Venice, which leads Sukenick to start seeing his own invisibility and erasure and his youthful self as a ghost - the modern day American Jew is as far removed from the European Jew as the latter is removed from the Israeli. We get a section in Jerusalem, where the people in the minibus airport with which the protagonist shared the journey from the airport, keep bumping into him in the tiny labyrinthine streets of old Jerusalem as he conducts a treasure hunt for the Golden Calf with these figures feeding him the clues.
I found it a thoroughly engrossing read about trying to place Jewish identity with all these threads throughout History. There were lots of ideas which got me thinking, though as in keeping with the different styles of each section employed by Sukenick, I enjoyed the individual sections and their ideas, without it ever coming together as a whole bringing a greater insight.
The riff nailing the psychology behind Le Pen's appeal is brilliantly nailed and explains the appeal of demagogues like Trump and Farage that we have today. They say the unsayable things many people are thinking but too scared to air themselves. Like Lenny Bruce, without the jokes. This book was Lenny Bruce, jokes included.
I don't understand why in his lifetime Sukenick insisted on truth in his fiction. Sure he uses autobiographical detail, such as snippets of tape recordings of conversations with his parents and including real life author friends Raymond Federman and Serge Doubrovsky and giving them a right of reply within the novel about being included in the novel! But for all this true life, why then resort to postmodern style and structure of a novel whose very artifice undermines any notions of 'truth as truth.
He's not attempting to write a memoir or an autobiography, as witnessed by a childhood comic-book hero fantasy section with him as part of a bomber crew in WW2, with teenage romantic crush as the co-pilot and a crew member who keeps dying and yet returning for the next mission - part Catch 22 and part South Park's "You killed Kenny". Or the pun-tastic stand-up comedy routine of the penultimate section, or the Maltese Falconesque noir final section chasing a stolen antiquity, a gold statuette of the Golden Calf, that alternative idol forged by a restive Jewish population waiting in the desert for the return of Moses from Mount Sinai and doubting the Jewish god accordingly.
'Mosaic Man' -a brilliant double-edged title, of a man built up in fragments like a mosaic, but also a man of Moses, that is a Jew. For this is Sukenick's inquiry into the nature of his Jewish identity. So we get sections set in Le Pen's France, Solidarity era Poland where the failing Communist regime resort to anti-Semitism as a rallying cry/scapegoating, even though there are virtually no Jews left in Poland; the ghosts of the original Jewish ghetto in 16th century Venice, which leads Sukenick to start seeing his own invisibility and erasure and his youthful self as a ghost - the modern day American Jew is as far removed from the European Jew as the latter is removed from the Israeli. We get a section in Jerusalem, where the people in the minibus airport with which the protagonist shared the journey from the airport, keep bumping into him in the tiny labyrinthine streets of old Jerusalem as he conducts a treasure hunt for the Golden Calf with these figures feeding him the clues.
I found it a thoroughly engrossing read about trying to place Jewish identity with all these threads throughout History. There were lots of ideas which got me thinking, though as in keeping with the different styles of each section employed by Sukenick, I enjoyed the individual sections and their ideas, without it ever coming together as a whole bringing a greater insight.
The riff nailing the psychology behind Le Pen's appeal is brilliantly nailed and explains the appeal of demagogues like Trump and Farage that we have today. They say the unsayable things many people are thinking but too scared to air themselves. Like Lenny Bruce, without the jokes. This book was Lenny Bruce, jokes included.
just wasn't really feeling this one i stopped reading back in fall of 23 i think lol