Take a photo of a barcode or cover
letitiaharmon 's review for:
My Name Is Asher Lev
by Chaim Potok
Oh my this book was a journey. An emotion-filled, thought-provoking, transformative journey. I ought to be writing an essay rather than a review on it but I'm not in school anymore so haha this is what we get.
My primary experience of this novel was "heaviness." Everything felt weighty. Here I was carrying childhood depression (the best and most relatable representation of this I think I've ever read in a novel), Russian progroms (which while existing on the periphery of Asher's life seem to be the dense center of gravity anchoring his whole family's existence), the torture of growing up gifted and different in an Orthodox community (you would think fundamentalist religion would be a larger piece of the trauma in this book than it is, but rather it is the weight of family expectations and the weirdness of being brilliant that causes far more turmoil).
I did begin to feel the book was a bit self-indulgent 2/3-3/4 of the way through and I became annoyed with it the same way I became annoyed with Dead Poets' Society and other such cloying stories of tortured rich boys. At one point a character tells Asher Lev he's had such a terribly difficult life and I'm like...I'm sorry, ok, some bad things happened around you, true, but every person in your life moved heaven and earth so you could do what you wanted from the time you were a child. You had a loving, heavily invested family, there were NO repercussions to your failure at school or to your stealing or to disrespecting your parents. As a matter of fact, there are many moments when Asher is not a sympathetic narrator at all, falling into the narcissism of the artistic prodigy that I can't determine was intentional or not on Potok's part.
But the end...dear Jesus (
My primary experience of this novel was "heaviness." Everything felt weighty. Here I was carrying childhood depression (the best and most relatable representation of this I think I've ever read in a novel), Russian progroms (which while existing on the periphery of Asher's life seem to be the dense center of gravity anchoring his whole family's existence), the torture of growing up gifted and different in an Orthodox community (you would think fundamentalist religion would be a larger piece of the trauma in this book than it is, but rather it is the weight of family expectations and the weirdness of being brilliant that causes far more turmoil).
I did begin to feel the book was a bit self-indulgent 2/3-3/4 of the way through and I became annoyed with it the same way I became annoyed with Dead Poets' Society and other such cloying stories of tortured rich boys. At one point a character tells Asher Lev he's had such a terribly difficult life and I'm like...I'm sorry, ok, some bad things happened around you, true, but every person in your life moved heaven and earth so you could do what you wanted from the time you were a child. You had a loving, heavily invested family, there were NO repercussions to your failure at school or to your stealing or to disrespecting your parents. As a matter of fact, there are many moments when Asher is not a sympathetic narrator at all, falling into the narcissism of the artistic prodigy that I can't determine was intentional or not on Potok's part.
But the end...dear Jesus (