Deborah > Recent Status Updates

I'm somewhat wondering about the reliability of the narrator-protagonist. Did his crush really interact with him as he describes or was this embellished by wishful thinking. That is - can I trust the author? Otherwise, the dialogues and considerations of playing the divorced parents off against each other, plus the mother's new husband and the circumstances of living under one roof, are plausible for a bright teen.

A lot to think about, where you live by right or by aspiration. What it would take to continue village life cut off from modern progress and amenities, linked in a family/generational web of relationships. Going to Haifa today for the second time a week after the first, attempting to see it through native's eyes. (I heard so much Russian today, and some Arabic.) It's a strange complex of sensations. Taking a break.

Starts well, moving between the young protagonist's feelings and events of present and past, the crisis between his parents and the appearance of a threatening stepfather, the origin of the boy's eating disorder that's left "to give it time..." A different set of circumstances than any book I've read in a long time (perhaps since Dickens in h.s.?), certainly more engaging than the A.B. Yehoshua I abandoned last week.

While I initially resisted the inclusion of EB's detailed scenes of his working in Iraq - by the end of this section I realized the effect of juxtaposing this with the petty intergenerational and individual dramas of middle-class British family life. Then the focal drama of having your own child go missing in an unfamiliar place paralleling the immediacy of the unknowns in a foreign war zone, became sensible.

I'm NOT appreciating the writing about Iraq. Need to be patient and discover what there is to it that intrinsically links it to the rest of the book - or is it just the author's going on about something contemporary upon which he cares to comment? A la "Cloud Atlas" he may have some hobbyhorse here.

Again completed a section in one long sitting and went on to start the next, because these are engaging characters and a plot that leads you ahead. I was abashed to rediscover at the start of the third section, a major character (E.B.) whose name I'd evidently forgotten when it appeared in the second.

Read the first section in one sitting, plus a few pages of the second section that's a less familiar register.The Cambridge undergraduates' dialogue, a bit too rich for my knowledge base. Here and there are words or phrase whose meanings I can only gloss from context and leave at that.

The intervention from the future is quite creepy as it's described from the contemporary protagonists' understanding.

I'm content to be reading this book, though the tone often is reminiscent of a charming college lecturer - not condescending but rather too casual for the tenor I'd expect on these subjects. Or that it's meant to be a popular book?

I'm reading this in small bits lately, finding the concepts challenging my understanding of how the present world I know is probably (?) just the latest stage resulting from capitalism that led predictably (but not inevitably?) to consumerism. I feel so manipulated despite my strident efforts to not conform!

I continue to enjoy the author's long scenes with detailed descriptions of the setting and the people's interactions. How in 1963 "Isaac" behaved with his adoptive parents (did he know?), and the encounter with Zohara and Yoav - another species of Jew whom he resembles! I'm having difficulty finishing this book because I feel attached to the characters.

It's puzzling why I was unmoved by Sara's story of her barracks-mate Inge and the Kapo. Too similar to so many others I've read (even with illustrations by Ella Liebermann-Shiber or Naomi Judkowski)? Sara's flat, rushed delivery like the way she always talks? I'm inclined to think the latter. If so, need to consider its effect on Adiva who's hearing it for the first time (about the mystery of the bread ritual).

I love how the author describes a scene full of people and their interactions while describing the setting with a smattering of details, much as we see our surroundings in more or less detail. The childhood visit to the cinema was most moving for the total inclusion Sara Carmeli extends to her daughter's best friend - and the surprise meeting with the younger Yigal and how compassionately he behaved.

I've been so naive - I always thought all those colonial exploiters who came in the explorers' wake were acting with the authority of their respective governments - but no! They hired military mercenaries as their "security forces" and pocketed all the gains (sharing with investors, right). That it was so enormous in scope leaves no doubt how we got to today's world order. Grrrrr!

The long scene of the four siblings without their parents, all trying to cope with the crisis of Z's lice infestation and needing her hair sheared off before she can go back to school - so much feeling of their intentions, their limitations, their helplessness as their mother is off on her interminable searches. Makes me feel the drama in which every child, every person grows up.

HIs description of credit starts off cheerily enough, but quickly makes me increasingly uncomfortable. The role of science is convincing though the economic imperative of growth is as I've always believed, an invitation to greed putting on the breaks in, well, job creation and all the rest. Now reading about the waves of European colonization (Spain, NL, England) is a death (disaster) foretold.

Took this along on a solo train trip to Tel Aviv to cosign DD#2's apartment rental contract, all of which was a relevant time to read an exile's writings of memory and memorabilia, place and time. I think I'm going to want to read everything by this author. Our copy came from the local used-book barn, thanks to DH (though looking for other volumes before ordering them online will require more searching locally=fun).

I'm into the part about how the pair of technology and capitalism move globalism. This is valuable as I usually read about the trees (thanks to our subscription to the daily International New York Times) and rarely see the forest. Am hoping to disabuse myself of any misperceptions due to the fragmentary nature of my attention over these expat decades, though bearing in mind this is only one author's reading of others

I appreciate getting brief mentions of terms I recognize without actually understanding in toto (e.g. social sciences and natural sciences), so I get clued in to how they fit into the grand picture of things. I returned to this book in a break after some intense reading fiction in English, and am a bit appalled at how much is left (as I have more fiction lined up). But the librarian inquired how much longer...!

Gripping plot and compelling characters got me to read this - uncharacteristically for me! - in long stretches including late nights, in two days. Then, though the hour was past midnight, I started the next volume of the trilogy. Full steam!

Thank goodness I've progressed to a new chapter. The last one (scene in the car between Z. and the investigator Yigal) seemed interminable: partly I wasn't devoting long enough blocks of time to get past a few pages that didn't "stick" in my head - partly because what was being described was overtly "confused" for several plot/character reasons. Not so successful but I take some of the blame.

In the past (busy) day I kept going back to read large installments, wanting to know more about the parallel episodes (past, present) and how the plot fits together. And when not reading: thinking what I know of the world as it is now - and how close in various aspects it already is, or is rapidly becoming, to the scenario in Snowman's time.

Yigal tells his Holocaust story - arresting thought that in the year I came to the country, people you'd meet who were born just before or during the war very likely went through it in Europe and lost family, which is his case. And again a story with details I would swear I've never encountered before in quite this way. They have these experiences in their past like I have - what, my Brooklyn or Rockaway childhood?

I find that reading this in small doses allows the ideas new to me to sink in. Actually I'm waiting for DD#1 to read it and see how it "speaks to" the gaps in her knowledge from getting a rather parochial education and getting an LLB degree rather than a B.A.

The scene of Adiva's family in the airport arrivals hall was like a stage play with each character in his or her role - it took me a while to get through it but that reflects the event's seemingly interminable nature. Contrast with Zohara leaving Rambam's maternity ward with the uniformed Yair after she gave birth to their son - the painful indignities of her situation rang true and so sad.

The wedding scene at kibbutz (Hulata) was devastatingly on target for the kibbutz of the early 80s (another of which I joined about then, after having experienced an Artzi kibbutz in the mid-'70s). Vivid descriptions, and sympathies to match. Would a similar young couple today find a different, more hopeful way to resolve an unplanned pregnancy so early in their relationship? I would hope so.

So far the most impressive passage: the interactions between the "obsessive, controlling" (author's later description) Auschwitz-survivor mother and her spirited, socially-integrated sabra son who cheerfully challenges her restrictions, e.g. using the carefully maintained porch room for summer suppers rather than the stifling interior - and the mother's hysterical, exaggerated response. And where each ends up.

This new section's unexpectedly stopped me in my tracks. I thought Part IV: the Scientific Revolution would be quite straightforward - but the heading of Chapter 14: The Discovery of Ignorance, stopped me in my tracks. Apparently we're getting into _social_ sciences, which study topics that interest me but with methodologies I don't "get". So I need to slow down and read with due attention, not over a meal.

I'm really impressed (contrary to the insulting reviewer in my daily paper the weekend before last) by the author's delicate treatment of interior monologue, recollections, and nuanced descriptions of characters' interactions. They stand as societal-historical "types" and as individuals. I'm reading slowly (partly as it's an acquired language for me) and have a sense of immediacy as though a spectator in each scene.

Ch. 4 about the child A. seeking the story behind "the blue numbers" that don't wash off in the shower - totally opened my eyes about what I hadn't understood from other reading: till May 1960 (a camp survivor's testimony published in Davar) and then the Eichmann trial (1961) - there was NO public discussion of the Holocaust in Israel! This gives context for understand other societal dynamics of which I've heard.