Word: bartfuss
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Dates: during 1988-1988
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...Appelfeld is regarded as one of Israel's best novelists -- though not necessarily its most typical. Living in a nation whose people have aggressively reversed the role of outsider and helpless victim, he still writes what he describes as a literature of uprootedness. In his new novel, The Immortal Bartfuss, the concept of a Jewish homeland is not relevant. Bartfuss, the emotionally anesthetized protagonist, does not even have a proper home. He sleeps in a room apart from a wife he avoids and two daughters he scarcely knows. Bartfuss is some sort of underworld trader who keeps his money hidden...
...absence of historical references, an active plot and sharp conflict, the novel is vulnerable to interpretation. Is Bartfuss a wandering Jew in, of all places, Zion? Is his folkloric deathlessness the author's way of saying that, even with their own nation, Jews are eternally restless and unsettled? Or is Bartfuss just suffering from post-Holocaust syndrome: a feeling of withdrawal and loneliness, and an inclination toward "morbid precision, excess awareness, complicated pain...
Good fiction can survive reductive quizzing, and The Immortal Bartfuss is more than passably good. Appelfeld quietly works the particulars and lets the generalizations take care of themselves. The half-light of early mornings and the battening darkness of late nights are the dominant tones of the book. Bartfuss's thoughts and feelings -- about his hateful wife, his distant + daughters, the treasure hidden in the basement -- have the cool clarity of the day's most private hours...
...next room Rosa and Bridget were still sleeping. The windows of the apartment were closed, and the heavy throbbing of their sleep could be felt even in the kitchen. Their forgotten existence awoke inside him for a moment and then passed away." Of such mortal moments is the immortal Bartfuss made and remembered. R.Z.S...
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