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marc129 's review for:
Falling Out of Time
by David Grossman
The literary genre of mourning lyric is a very delicate one, because it is so easy to fall into cheap self-pity, superficial lamentation or pathetic exaggeration; or so it can seem to an outsider. Grossman wrote this book five years after the death of his own son Uri, who was killed in the short Israeli-Lebanese war of 2006. He chose a special style that mixes theatrical play, prose and pure poetry.
People suddenly leave their home, their family, their occupation, and start looking for their son or daughter who has been dead for years (“fallen out of time”); they find each other in a kind of caravan, wandering around, looking for the place - 'there' - where their child could be now; while reading you hear the different voices of these people, in short, moving monologues, conversations with themselves or with the dead, lamentations, uttering very divergent emotions. Regularly this is really heart gripping, making the raw feeling of grief tangible to the edge of the bearable.
But there is also a chronicler, who describes what happens, and after a while participates in the towing caravan, on behalf of his boss, the Duke. That gives this story a strange-medieval aspect, and it becomes even stranger because also a centaur (a Greek mythological figure) is one of the participants and in fact plays a fairly important role. The story itself seems to go in fits and starts, and some scenes are rather cryptic; so, you often get a sense of alienation, perhaps on purpose.
And thus, the style and structure of this book really reminded me of the classical Greek tragedies, especially those of Sophocles and Euripides. You must be a very big one to be able to measure yourself with these; poetically, Grossman certainly succeeds in that task, but theatrically I am less convinced. But this is without doubt an authentic, very personal expression of mourning, worthy to be read, reread and respected.
People suddenly leave their home, their family, their occupation, and start looking for their son or daughter who has been dead for years (“fallen out of time”); they find each other in a kind of caravan, wandering around, looking for the place - 'there' - where their child could be now; while reading you hear the different voices of these people, in short, moving monologues, conversations with themselves or with the dead, lamentations, uttering very divergent emotions. Regularly this is really heart gripping, making the raw feeling of grief tangible to the edge of the bearable.
But there is also a chronicler, who describes what happens, and after a while participates in the towing caravan, on behalf of his boss, the Duke. That gives this story a strange-medieval aspect, and it becomes even stranger because also a centaur (a Greek mythological figure) is one of the participants and in fact plays a fairly important role. The story itself seems to go in fits and starts, and some scenes are rather cryptic; so, you often get a sense of alienation, perhaps on purpose.
And thus, the style and structure of this book really reminded me of the classical Greek tragedies, especially those of Sophocles and Euripides. You must be a very big one to be able to measure yourself with these; poetically, Grossman certainly succeeds in that task, but theatrically I am less convinced. But this is without doubt an authentic, very personal expression of mourning, worthy to be read, reread and respected.