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.

Brooklyn is not expanding

-MOTHER: He's been depressed. All of a sudden, he can't do anything.
-DOCTOR: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
-MOTHER: Tell Dr. Flicker. It's something he read.
-DOCTOR: Something he read, huh?
-ALVY: The universe is expanding.
-DOCTOR: The universe is expanding?
-ALVY: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything.
-MOTHER: What is that your business? He stopped doing his homework!
-ALVY: What's the point?
-MOTHER: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
-DOCTOR: It won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here. Uh?

Woody Allen, Annie Hall.