Monday, June 28, 2010

Again To the End of the Land

David Grossman's fine novel To the End of the Land is to appear soon in English. The New York Review of Books has just published a section, and they've unerringly chosen the wrong one and added an irrelevant but nasty photograph. Still, it is a fine book, and the more people read it, the better.

I'm taking the occasion to re-link to my review of it from 2008, here. The only change I'd make in light of the intervening two years is to note that the extravagant reception the book had in Israel back in 2008 then petered out. At the time the book was heralded as the most important novel of its decade. I'm not certain that still stands.

Though it is on my short list.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've read the excerpt
- I think you are right that an editor would have been very very good for the book
- in the NYRB excerpt I get told more times than I care to remember about Sami's flesh and his goodness
- OK that's a kind of 3rd person stream of consciousness if something like that exists and so has a "right" to be repetitive but still after a while it made me feel like does the author think I'm thick.

Silke

Anonymous said...

I forgot
I don't like the tranlation - there seems to be a rhathm to the text which she isn't getting yet
but if she still has till September let's hope she learns how to transfer it till then (if I am right and it is there)
Silke