{"id":2242,"date":"2014-07-21T12:44:33","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T12:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=2242"},"modified":"2014-07-21T12:45:57","modified_gmt":"2014-07-21T12:45:57","slug":"stop-the-clocks-falling-out-of-time-by-david-grossman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/stop-the-clocks-falling-out-of-time-by-david-grossman","title":{"rendered":"Stop the Clocks-\u2018Falling Out of Time,\u2019 by David Grossman"},"content":{"rendered":"

By EDWARD HIRSCHJULY 18, 2014<\/span>
\n\"0720-bks-Hirsh-master180\"<\/a><\/p>\n

David Grossman Credit Illustration by Peter Arkle
\nThe emblematic Man, any man, every man \u2014 dazed, heartsick, utterly bewildered \u2014 suddenly pushes away his dinner and gets up from the kitchen table. He can\u2019t take it any longer \u2014 the overwhelming, claustrophobic grief, which has hollowed him out \u2014 and so he decides to go \u201cthere.\u201d But where is there? That\u2019s what the emblematic Woman, any woman, every woman, can\u2019t figure out. That\u2019s 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\u2019ve lost a child. You are already wounded by disaster, forever bereft. \u201cIn an instant we were cast out \/ to a land of exile,\u201d she remembers. But this man can\u2019t sit still any longer. The trouble has taken him over again. And so he sets out to go \u201cthere\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The Israeli writer David Grossman has crafted a strange and riveting book \u2014 partly a folk tale, partly a play, partly a novel in verse. There\u2019s 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\u2019s art. Grossman operates in a different register here than in his previous novel, \u201cTo the End of the Land,\u201d one of the great antiwar books of our era. In \u201cFalling Out of Time\u201d the characters are generalized types, as in a medieval allegory or a Beckett play, though their griefs are specific, their losses poignant and real.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 the reticent Net Mender (Woman in Net), the stuttering Midwife, the Cobbler, the Elderly Math Teacher \u2014 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 (\u201cI must re-create it in the form of a story!\u201d), the Woman Atop the Belfry (\u201cI walk alone now \/ in circles, around \/ a ferrous spire\u201d), 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0For detail please visit here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By EDWARD HIRSCHJULY 18, 2014 David Gros … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[647,648,643],"views":1461,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2242"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2245,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2242\/revisions\/2245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}