By EDWARD HIRSCHJULY 18, 2014
David Grossman Credit Illustration by Peter Arkle
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.