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kitnotmarlowe 's review for:
The Weight of Ink
by Rachel Kadish
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The most thrilling scene in this book is when an academic purposefully sabotages a 400-year-old manuscript to prevent a rival from obtaining information. And I gasped. As a sometimes-heritage professional, I was scandalized; as a reader, I was hooting and hollering. This book was my Superbowl. I don't know sports. Anyway, if you enjoy academic sabotage and/or are interested in 17th-century Sephardic Jewish life in London, I cannot recommend The Weight of Ink highly enough.
My issue with dual-timeline historical fiction about people in the present discovering the past is that the present storyline serves as a vehicle for the past storyline. The present-timeline characters are almost always less engaging than the past-timeline characters, sometimes to the point of being unnecessary. They serve little purpose beyond being a mouthpiece for the past to speak through and a self-insert for the modern reader who may or may not be historically inclined.
Fortunately, this was not the case here. Rachel Kadish juggles three storylines—Helen and Aaron working with the manuscripts in 2000, Helen's time in Israel in the 1950s, and Ester's life in the 1660s—with no weak links. There were times during the Ester storyline (the most exciting section and the emotional core) when I wanted to go back to Helen and Aaron transcribing documents in the archives. It's just so thrilling!
Kadish's prose is richly textured, full of beauty and humour. We get fun little jabs between English Helen and American Aaron that feel like a reenactment of the War of 1812 (in chapter 11, Aaron "return[s] as though unexplained forty-minute breaks were one of those inalienable American rights," and in chapter 23, Aaron describes Helen as "so English her resting pulse is a negative number." The humour isn't limited to the present, and Kadish's 17th-century England (and 1950s Israel) isn't a stuffy academic recreation. See, for example, Chapter 18: "Even in Latin, [Ester]'d no patience for sentences that simpered like a bent neck," or Chapter 26, where Ester observes that Rivka "had been rehearsing for her own death since she'd first been cursed with survival. These lines are funny, at times darkly, but they reveal so much more about the characters than pithy epithets.
And the beauty of this book. I mentioned it before, but scrolling through my Kindle highlights, I realized how central the little beauties of life are to the novel, especially in Ester's story.
Early in Ester's story, "the ugliness of her life pooled inside her" (chapter 8), but by the end, we get this: "the comet's light existed for the mere purpose of shining. It hurtled because the cosmos demanded it to hurtle." We see Ester's appetite for life grow, just as the cosmos demands the comet hurtle from the desire for motion and beauty. She hungers for education and theological meaning, and she hungers for life. Even when her adopted city is destroyed by plague and fire, even when she fears for her life, Ester learns to live and love it well.
The only flaw in The Weight of Ink is that it takes too long to wrap up. I understand why Kadish needs to take her time concluding all her storylines, especially Ester's, but the emotions become too thin when stretched out this far. While it's a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things, it nonetheless harshed my vibe.
Anyway, if you love it when academics title articles like "So-and-So is a HACK and WRONG About (X) and Here's Why, With Footnotes," I can almost guarantee you'll love this book. Presidential alert: the academics are fightinggg!!!