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A review by carlageek
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
3.0
This book is built on a smashing idea, the story of a 17th-century Jewish woman philosopher and two modern scholars who discover her papers and study her. (Comparison’s to A.S. Byatt’s Possession are inevitable.) Kadish’s research is impressive, and her reconstruction of the several-times-over-diaspora Jewish community of Restoration-era London—Jews who fled Portugal and later left Amsterdam—is vivid. There is interesting tension between their desire to live Jewish lives on the one hand, and their desire to assimilate on the other, mixed with a generous dose of PTSD from the Inquisition; they are distrustful of England’s proclamations of tolerance, with fresh memories of persecution and exile to remind them that tolerance can evaporate with little notice.
Against that backdrop toils Ester Velasquez, scribing for an ancient rabbi who is his excited at Ester’s sharpness and thirst for learning—the only student he ever had who was as brilliant, he tells her at one point, is the exiled heretic Spinoza. But while Ester is an exciting character, there’s very little about the book that measures up to the promise of its premise. The writing is tedious, writerly and melodramatic, belaboring every emotion. Some plot points are implausible to the point of annoyance, and annoyance made worse by the fact that they could have been excised without harm to the best parts of the story (I am thinking in particular of the ridiculous interlude where Ester attends the theater with a spoiled young woman she has been charged with taming, and the cloying romance of Ester’s that follows it—just painful to read, all of it.)
The modern story is all right, at its best when it traces the growth of trust and friendship between the two principals, the aging, ailing professor Helen Watt and the arrogant student who works for her, Aaron Levy. But this story takes forever to get off the ground, bogged down by interminable (and overwritten) backstory about—again—the star-crossed romances suffered by each of the them. Helen, pathetically, is somehow unable to let go of a lover from whom she parted half a century before (yawn), while Aaron obsesses over a hot girl he spent one afternoon with (eye roll). It’s astonishing that Kadish, who clearly has a comprehensive knowledge of philosophy and history, can’t seem to come up with a source of conflict for anyone but Ester that isn’t about luuurrrvvvve—and even Ester’s GREAT conflict of the mind isn’t good enough for her, but must be supplemented with a romance of its own. Feh.
These are ... not entirely book-ruining problems, but they come very close. This book would have been a masterpiece if some ruthless editor had slashed out a third of it, focusing it down on the parts that are really interesting and fresh: What drives a mind toward learning? What drives such a mind when everything in the world is arrayed against it? The book does explore these questions, and it may even be worth reading for what it has to say about them, but prepare yourself for a bit of an overwritten, honey-slathered slog.
Against that backdrop toils Ester Velasquez, scribing for an ancient rabbi who is his excited at Ester’s sharpness and thirst for learning—the only student he ever had who was as brilliant, he tells her at one point, is the exiled heretic Spinoza. But while Ester is an exciting character, there’s very little about the book that measures up to the promise of its premise. The writing is tedious, writerly and melodramatic, belaboring every emotion. Some plot points are implausible to the point of annoyance, and annoyance made worse by the fact that they could have been excised without harm to the best parts of the story (I am thinking in particular of the ridiculous interlude where Ester attends the theater with a spoiled young woman she has been charged with taming, and the cloying romance of Ester’s that follows it—just painful to read, all of it.)
The modern story is all right, at its best when it traces the growth of trust and friendship between the two principals, the aging, ailing professor Helen Watt and the arrogant student who works for her, Aaron Levy. But this story takes forever to get off the ground, bogged down by interminable (and overwritten) backstory about—again—the star-crossed romances suffered by each of the them. Helen, pathetically, is somehow unable to let go of a lover from whom she parted half a century before (yawn), while Aaron obsesses over a hot girl he spent one afternoon with (eye roll). It’s astonishing that Kadish, who clearly has a comprehensive knowledge of philosophy and history, can’t seem to come up with a source of conflict for anyone but Ester that isn’t about luuurrrvvvve—and even Ester’s GREAT conflict of the mind isn’t good enough for her, but must be supplemented with a romance of its own. Feh.
These are ... not entirely book-ruining problems, but they come very close. This book would have been a masterpiece if some ruthless editor had slashed out a third of it, focusing it down on the parts that are really interesting and fresh: What drives a mind toward learning? What drives such a mind when everything in the world is arrayed against it? The book does explore these questions, and it may even be worth reading for what it has to say about them, but prepare yourself for a bit of an overwritten, honey-slathered slog.