Skip to main content

More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman review – a true tale of survival

From Tito’s gulags to a kibbutz … this is a powerful retelling of a Jewish woman’s extraordinary life, and of a family’s emotional trauma, from the author of A Horse Walks into a Bar

Israeli author David Grossman’s concisely devastating novel was inspired by the life of Eva Panić Nahir, a Jewish woman from the former Yugoslavia who, having been imprisoned and tortured as a traitor in one of Tito’s gulags, came to Israel with her daughter, married a widower and created a politically and socially active life on a kibbutz. But that condensed biography barely scrapes the surface of a story so emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it takes all of Grossman’s considerable skills to render.

He is not the first artist to attempt it; the Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš made a television series about Eva, and there was a documentary in 2003. But Grossman, who had a “profound friendship” with her for more than 20 years until her death in 2015, evidently felt that there was more to say, and has responded to Eva’s wish for her and her daughter Tiana’s story to be told once more. In doing so, he has demonstrated again that the novel – elastic, expansive, amenable to painful fragmentation – can provide a space for the most harrowing and resistant material.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WsVfWC
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more