dimecres, 3 de novembre del 2010

The book will save you

“The book will save you.” Yehoshua told him, “Don’t change the book. It is an organic thing. Go with the book, and the new elements that will enter, let them enter.”


The day after the end of shivah, [David] Grossman returned to his novel. Everything was now broken to pieces—the world was no longer a home. Yet if this was to be his fate he wanted to explore its every nuance, and in this novel he could. The book would become his home. For that, at least, he was grateful. The story and the themes of the novel didn’t change, but the process of writing became heightened, as if he were seeing with new eyes.


Within a year, the novel was finished, and in 2008 “Isha Borachat Mi’bsora” (“Woman Flees Tidings”) was published in Israel. An English translation, by Jessica Cohen, appears this month, under the title “To the End of the Land.” Grossman told me, “This book was such an act of choosing life.”


George Packer, The New Yorker. The unconsoled.