Cynthia OzickBesprekingen

EN COTIZACIÓN

I enjoyed this, but after some years since reading it, I don't recall enough to discuss it.

I think incessantly of death, of oblivion, how nothing lasts, not even memory when the one who remembers is gone… 


I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing.



If there were ever any doubt that Ozick is a master storyteller, here’s your proof.



Do yourself a favor and skip the blurb; don’t read the synopsis. Let Petrie’s fictional monologue take you over; let yourself get to know him, his regrets, his idiosyncrasies, his losses, his attempts at connection with others. 



Imagine an interior monologue—shaped just as America shakes off the first half of the twentieth century—that is an examination of the shackles of memory, a questioning of who "owns" whose history and legacy, and a laying bare of the guilt involved in carrying your own and others' stories into the next generation.

Imagine this told with the baroque stylings of James within a Proustian project of aging, of facing both one’s mortality and the death of an age, wherein Dreyfus makes an appearance and for which fans of Bolano’s slim monologues and Marias’s own Jamesian verbosities will salivate at the mouth. 



Do yourself another favor and read this all in one gulp.

I didn’t really understand it, but I liked it anyway, it was very enjoyable to read, the writing was almost like poetry. My first Ozick novel, I’ll have to try another.

Una mujer de mediana edad parece andar sin rumbo por las calles de París en una tarde de calor asfixiante de finales de julio de 1952. Finalmente se sienta en un bar, pide un zumo y pregunta al camarero si por casualidad conoce a un tal Julian. No es la primera vez que lo hace, pero nadie recuerda a ese chico norteamericano de pelo rubio y aspecto desaliñado, que un buen día dejó su casa de California para viajar por Europa e instalarse en París, lejos de un padre intransigente y una madre que se ha refugiado en la locura para aliviar el deber de vivir. Quien busca y pregunta es su tía Bea, dispuesta a llevárselo de vuelta y hacer de él un hombre de provecho, pero cuando finalmente la mujer descubra el paradero de Julian, habrá algo insólito esperándole: otros cuerpos, otras voces, reclamándole una nueva versión del amor. Lejos de su tierra y abrumada al principio por el desorden que aun arrasa Europa tras la guerra, Bea ahora quiere comprender, y lo que había empezado como un simple viaje acaba siendo una lección de sabiduría.

I'm not sure why, but this story failed to connect with me. I guess it felt like there wasn't anything there that hadn't been seen before. The level of involvement with the characters was too shallow for me to feel anything but a general angst (which I always feel when this subject is broached). It was sad, but in the way that knowing this happened to people is sad, not in the specific way that I wanted to find. There was no one character I could relate to in a closer way. Perhaps for me a short story is just too short to convey this level of horror.

I found this to be kind of on the boring side. Don’t remember when I actually started to read this, just remember the joy of finally being done with the book. Maybe reading a sad book during the pandemic wasn’t the greatest thing to do.

In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island.

Where was I––the I that reads and loves books––when I read this book?

I see it on the shelf at the library. I see my hand reaching for the book many times. It resides on the highest shelf, on the left, in the middle of fiction, centered on the east side of my little library. Standing tiptoed, I pull it down from its spot, more than once. And then, finally, I check it out and bring it home.

I read this slim book in an evening. I admire Ozick's masterly writing.

I had not yet read any of Cynthia Ozick's books, and I had wanted to. And there it was, day after day, year after year, at my library.

I read this book, but...

Where was my soul? Where was my mind, when I read this book? I remember almost nothing about it. "Almost" might be me being too kind to myself. I am reading the reviews here on Goodreads and don't remember this story. Where was I? I'm feeling a bit devastated––if that's possible.

Only because it's also possible I had just finished reading [b:Reading the Holocaust|48840|Reading the Holocaust|Inga Clendinnen|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386923664s/48840.jpg|47781], when I picked The Shawl up to read, will I forgive my forgetting. [a:Inga Clendinnen|27425|Inga Clendinnen|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1253355609p2/27425.jpg]'s book left me numb, the Gorgon effect and all. This was all a long time ago, too.

I don't remember The Ambassadors, and was not interested enough in this book to look at it again. Most of the writing is fine, and I was interested in what happened to the characters, even though I did not really care about them. Ozick wrote each one to represent something that she knew more about than the reader did, and I found that tedious.½

Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie is one sick puppy. Now a retired lawyer, he is preparing a memoir of his years as a student at Temple Academy in the late 19th Century.

Simultaneously arrogant, judgmental and needy. Critical of everyone and anyone including his colleagues, Temple staff, his son, (who understandably wants little to do with him), and Jews. Ironically, he is drawn to Jews and befriends an older socially withdrawn classmate, Ben-Zion Elefantin which gets him taunted by his classmates. Petrie is hurt by Elefantin's dismissal of Petrie's father's collection of Middle Eastern artifacts. Seems Elefantin's parents have virtually abandoned him at Temple Academy to go antiquing in the Middle East. Ben-Zion believes they are the only ones to recognize true and valuable antiques, and will not even look at Petrie’s father’s collection! But so many years later Lloyd wonders what became of Ben-Zion after he left Temple Academy.

Petrie interacted with another Jewish student, Ned Greenhill. Years later Petrie continued to meet with Greenhill for dinner periodically. But, in his memoir he writes, that he never considered inviting a Jew to his home to meet his family! Just when I hoped Lloyd would show some small movement to normalcy and humanity, he disappoints falling back on what is familiar, his deeply entrenched cultural Anti-Semitism.

His memoirs indicate his obvious jealousy of both Ned who had become a judge, and of Ned’s son succeeding in the real estate field. Petrie is very disappointed in the career direction his son has taken, now floundering to get attention for one of his many creative concepts.

I see Petrie as pitifully stuck in a putrid stagnant time and culture swamp. He may have taken a few tiny steps toward change when he was a young student but despite getting a good education, he didn’t use his brain, or his heart. He just followed along the restrictive, racist, uncharitable path his family and community had taken for generations, and he was a miserable human being for doing so.

Ozick’s books are disturbingly visceral. She brilliantly and forcibly pulls the reader in and makes one feel and think.

Excellent writing.

skimmed - due to her reputation and the marvelous cover - couldn't get interested enough to read closely

by Cynthia Ozick | Read by Yelena Shmulenson
Fiction • 1.75 hrs. • Unabridged • © 1981
When we first meet Rosa, the shawl is wrapped around her toddler, Magda, as she and her niece, Stella, are being marched somewhere. Yelena Shmulenson gives just the subtlest tinge of accent to this section so that before the text clarifies what is happening, you are guessing—Eastern Europe? The Nazi years? In the main body of the story, Rosa is an old woman retired to Miami Beach. Here, Shmulenson uses no accent, a choice that heightens Rosa's reality: On the surface, she's assimilated, American. Inside, she is utterly shattered, a permanent refugee from the time before what happened, happened. This is a memorable, harrowing work, and Shmulenson gives us Rosa's deranged inner world with perfectly modulated sensitivity and power. It will haunt you. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, SYNC 2014 ©

There is both irony and mystery in this short novel. The central irony is that the narrator, an aging “Waspy” (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) New Yorker writing in 1949, has absorbed antisemitism “with his milk”, yet the most significant relationships in his life – both as a schoolboy and as an old man – are with Jews. The mystery remains a mystery; I have some theories about it, but – even after reading the book twice – no hard and fast answers. It is written by a skillful and accomplished author, so it was enjoyable both times, and I do not exclude the possibility of one further reading in an effort to solve it.

The book is in the form of a memoire, written by elderly widower Lloyd Petrie, about his schooldays at a snobby private school in the New York suburbs. At the time of writing, the school has long ceased to function as such, and has been turned into a residence for old boys of the school, where Lloyd now lives. When the school-turned-retirement home becomes too run-down and decrepit to continue, Lloyd is offered a luxury suite in an apartment block in the city, being developed by the son of one of the Jewish boys who had latterly been tolerated at his school. His old school companion tells him that he is offering Lloyd this living accommodation because he was the only one of the non-Jewish boys who did not taunt him or call him “Hebe.”

It was not out of decency or fellow feeling that Lloyd refrained from the general abuse that was heaped on the Jewish boys, but because his association with another boy, Ben-Zion Elephantin, had already made Lloyd himself an “outcast.” Ben Zion is the central mystery; clearly - from his name, the description of his Tefillin and his picky eating habits – he is in some way Jewish. But what kind of Jew is he? And what is the quest that drives his parents around the world, leaving their son in a variety of boarding schools? Ben-Zion believes himself to be descended from a group of Israelites who somehow got separated from the others after the Exodus, became lost in the desert and never made it to the Promised Land. Instead, they returned to Egypt and settled on an island in the Nile called Elephantine; there they built their own temple and observed the laws of the Torah, as they understood them. (There was in fact a colony of Israelites on the island of Elephantine in the 4th Century BCE.)

Lloyd and Ben-Zion first get acquainted over the chess board, but Lloyd is desperate to get closer. To that end, he tries to interest him in a mysterious and little talked about episode in the life of Lloyd's father, who suddenly decamped from the family law firm and left his new bride, to go to Egypt and join an archeological dig. But when Lloyd shares with Ben-Zion some of the Egyptian artifacts, that he has inherited from his father, they have the opposite effect from what he had hoped for, completely alienating the object of his passion.

The memoire is produced slowly and tortuously by its author, plagued by various distractions and his advancing age. As he nears the end of his life, Lloyd believes that he has understood what it is that Ben-Zion and his parents are searching for. Has he, or is his insight merely the product of a confused mind? Please let me know if you figure it out.

My faves from this book: Dostoevsky's Unabomber, A Drug Store Eden, The Synthetic Sublime, The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination, Who Owns Anne Frank?, and Public Intellectuals.

Nice to read but I had no idea what was happening most of the time. the structure of the book seems to have appeared in my mind a few hours after finishing it, but at the time of reading I was just swirling along in a surreal pool of words.
Contains some very tasty sentences and memorably odd characters.
A book for book lovers. I wasn't always sure if they were talking about real authors or made up ones (I only recognised a fraction of the names), I clearly need to try harder at reading widely.

Pretty standard fare for Ozick but not among my favorites. It's good but didn't knock my socks off.

I didn't love it, but then I don't love James and haven't read his The Ambassadors, of which this is apparently sort of a retelling. I think I'm just not the right reader for this book. It's my least favorite of the several Ozick books I've read.

I'm a little conflicted about this short collection because the two middle stories I find kind of puzzling, but I really liked the title story and the last ("What Happened to the Baby") very satisfying. Ozick again (I've mentioned a couple of her books before) here displays sort of dazzling creativity and a concern for big things like art and creative agency and human suffering that I find admirable. I'd like to read this collection again in a few years and will certainly keep reading Ozick.

What a strange book! I've never read anything quite like it, and it's worth reading for the novelty alone. It's very self-consciously a book about creating character, which I found pretty interesting but which might be irritating if you're not into that sort of thing. While each of the sections has a sort of plot, this isn't a novel in the conventional sense, which again is pretty fun if you're ok with that sort of thing but might be a let-down for readers into more traditional novels. I liked it a lot and will read more by Ozick.

A study in pathology and, maybe, escape from it, told in affecting, crystalline prose.

I think the thing I most like about Ozick is that she writes in a way that seems erudite but not in a way that makes me feel stupid. Although I suspect there's more structured meaning and a great deal more nuance in a book like this than I'm equipped to discover, I find that I feel reasonably smart when reading it, which is a nice feeling. She also writes stories that I could never have imagined anybody would have conceived of writing, which is not to say that they're necessarily fantastical (well, Puttermesser was a bit fantastical) but more that they're remarkable in how they tease the extraordinary out of the ordinary. Her prose clicks pretty well with me (I wouldn't often call it beautiful or high on style, but there's an elegance and a precision about it that I admire), though she's maybe overfond in this book of the colon.

Ozick concentrate. Smarter than you will ever be. Essays on authors are the strongest. On abstract topics are less strong and tend to wander. Ozick is a better thinker than feeler but owe man, what a thinker. Like watching Evil Kneevil of the mind leap over 15 cars.

Una madre, una figlia, una nipote. Tre figure femminili travolte dalla Storia e dai suoi orrori. Un indumento magico, un feticcio: lo scialle che protegge e nasconde. In pagine sobrie ed essenziali, con pochi, nitidi tratti, Cynthia Ozick riesce a narrare l'inenarrabile: l'esperienza del lager, la sopravvivenza al lager. Nel racconto febbricitante e visionario di Rosa, una donna, una madre che ha perduto la figlia e con essa ogni ragione di vita, il passato incombe sul presente e il presente si volge al passato. Il prima e il dopo si richiamano di continuo, senza apparente via di scampo. Il conseguente esilio volontario e l'estraneità al mondo di Rosa rasentano una follia che si erge a baluardo contro la disperazione e contro i tentativi di intrusione altrui. Tutto le appare una grottesca riproposta della tragedia, così rifugge ogni contatto, respinge ogni approccio, rifiuta ogni essere umano. Con un'eccezione, tuttavia, che insinua una tenue speranza, in quello che è un piccolo capolavoro della letteratura ebraico-americana. (fonte: Feltrinelli)

I had a shaky start with this book, and ended really enjoying it. Based on a real-life lost manuscript of Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, murdered by the nazis, it explores lost identity, lost family and lost culture, and how those vacuums are filled. The holocaust is woven through the narrative, at times explicitly, at times in the drift of smoke from something roasting or on fire.

There's a progression from febrile unreality towards bland materiality, that in gaining, the main character, Lars Andemening, loses something.

Although by the book's end Andemening's trajectory has been from night into day, from private to consensus reality, there remains a thrill of the uncertain, the possibility that the fantastic, veiled and withdrawn, is still imminent, its potential to break through and disrupt still alive and ready to reclaim.

I'm glad that I persevered beyond the first 19 pages, and I'm inspired to seek out the surviving works of Schulz, which is one of the blessings of reading books inspired on the works of other writers.