SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW Stop the Clocks ‘Falling Out of Time,’ by David Grossman By EDWARD HIRSCHJULY 18, 2014 THE NEW YORK TIMES The emblematic Man, any man, every man — dazed, heartsick, utterly bewildered — suddenly pushes away his dinner and gets up from the kitchen table. He can’t take it any longer — the overwhelming, claustrophobic grief, which has hollowed him out — and so he decides to go “there.” But where is there? That’s what the emblematic Woman, any woman, every woman, can’t figure out. That’s what she wants to know. She understands, this woman who is also a mother, a wife, that there is no place to go when you’ve lost a child. You are already wounded by disaster, forever bereft. “In an instant we were cast out / to a land of exile,” she remembers. But this man can’t sit still any longer. The trouble has taken him over again. And so he sets out to go “there” anyway. It has been five years, and he is determined to see his dead son one more time, though no one has ever made the journey and come back alive. Like a figure in a myth, he is going to walk across a divide, leaving the living behind, the innocent ones, who still exist inside of ordinary time. The Israeli writer David Grossman has crafted a strange and riveting book — partly a folk tale, partly a play, partly a novel in verse. There’s no genre to describe it. Capably translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, some of it unfolds in prose, some in short lines, though the staccato line breaks are flawed and the lineation is probably the weakest aspect of this otherwise well-written book, which aspires to poetry. It succeeds instead as fiction, the storyteller’s art. Grossman operates in a different register here than in his previous novel, “To the End of the Land,” one of the great antiwar books of our era. In “Falling Out of Time” the characters are generalized types, as in a medieval allegory or a Beckett play, though their griefs are specific, their losses poignant and real. There is the Town Chronicler, a clerk, a village explainer who serves as the narrator, the deputy of a public voice. The center of the action, such as it is, is the Walking Man, a sort of Giacometti sculpture brought to life, a stubborn, wayward figure who paces in widening circles around the village and slowly picks up other distraught, grief-stricken figures — the reticent Net Mender (Woman in Net), the stuttering Midwife, the Cobbler, the Elderly Math Teacher — each ready to join the journey to nowhere, each in the grip of a staggering loss. There is also the tormented writer, whom the townspeople have nicknamed the Centaur (“I must re-create it in the form of a story!”), the Woman Atop the Belfry (“I walk alone now / in circles, around / a ferrous spire”), and the Duke, the benign ruler over this dark fairy-tale kingdom. And what holds this odd assortment of walkers together? They all belong to the saddest club on earth. Grief is democratic. It crosses barriers and strikes at will. “Mourning condemns / the living / to the grimmest solitude,” the Woman recognizes. But these solitaries fall in together, shoulder to shoulder, neither awake nor asleep, obsessively talking to their dead sons and daughters, asking them unanswerable questions (“But where are you, what are you, / just tell me that, my son”), addressing one another, trying to understand the hole inside themselves, the memories now wedded to pain, the need to remember, the fear of forgetting, the compulsion to keep moving. They are deranged by longing. As the Town Chronicler explains: “They walk on the hills and I follow them, constantly darting between them and the town. They groan and trip and stand, hold on to each other, carry those who sleep, falling asleep themselves. Nights, days, over and over they circle the town, through rain and cold and burning sun. Who knows how long they will walk and what will happen when they are roused from their madness?” In the final section of the book the walkers sometimes speak in unison as a chorus of grief. They ask their fallen children about death. They see them alive again, frozen in childhood — jumping, dancing in the kitchen. Despair is with them, too, in their fruitless journey. “And you were right, / my wife, righter than me — ,” the Walking Man realizes: there is no there, there is no there, and even if I walk for all of time I will not get there, not alive. But the passion to walk continues to motivate them, like a curse. “Perhaps this walk itself is both / the answer and the question?” the Town Chronicler’s Wife wonders aloud. And so the walk continues. Life is suspended in this book, and the walkers travel in a timeless space. Yet somehow they come closer and closer to what they call “the blaze.” “My heart tells me, my boy, that from the moment a person notices the blaze, he is destined to get up and go to it,” the Elderly Math Teacher observes matter-of-factly. They discover a massive wall they hadn’t seen before, a pit in the ground, the earth itself, the final threshold: one last line shared both by here and there, the line to which — no farther — the living may draw near. They approach it together, as one. “Falling Out of Time” identifies these mourners, the ones who are a few years out, as walkers moving into another stage of grief. They are everywhere shadowed by what has happened to them. Look closely and you’ll see them circling the village, any village, every village. There is a special kind of sorrow etched into their faces. Some people bear a loss that seems unendurable, and yet it must be endured. It is unacceptable, and yet it must be accepted. FALLING OUT OF TIME By David Grossman Translated by Jessica Cohen. 193 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95. Edward Hirsch’s new prose book is “A Poet’s Glossary.” His book-length poem, “Gabriel,” will be published in September.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 05:33:54 +0000
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