Friday, April 11, 2014

Review: Falling Out of Time by David Grossman

Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 208
Received: Received a copy from Random House of Canada in exchange for an honest review

Release Date: March 25, 2014
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Goodreads Synopsis:

Following his magisterial To the End of the Land, the universally acclaimed Israeli author brings us an incandescent fable of parental grief––concise, elemental, a powerfully distilled experience of understanding and acceptance, and of art’s triumph over death.

In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama––part play, part prose, pure poetry––to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son. The man––called simply Walking Man––paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net-Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Math Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman’s answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death’s hermetic separateness. For the reader, the solace is in their clamorous vitality, and in the gift of Grossman’s storytelling––a realm where loss is not merely an absence but a life force of its own.

My Review:

I chose this book to read because I wanted to try something new and out of my comfort zone, and the synopsis of this book really had me interested. I have to say that the time that I chose this book was a very difficult time for me, I had just lost my grandmother and I think reading a book about death and bereavement helped me in a way. Though what the characters in this book were going through was different, it still really speaks to readers about how hard loss is.

This book is a short and can be a quick read, but I think it is the type of book that you really need to spend a lot of time going over. It makes you think and if you don't pay attention, you could get lost as to what is happening with the characters. I think that the story being written in a poetic verse added to the story, in a way the grief of these characters came out more in the writing. Each person walking in these circles is calling out to their lost one hoping for one last fleeting moment, for just a little bit of solace. I'm not completely sure how to  review this book, it's not a story for everyone (I was ready to give up once or twice) but I found myself seeing what these people were going through, and almost hoping for something to come out of what they were doing.

I can say I am glad I tried to get out of my comfort zone for once with this book. It is a story that will touch readers, and I do want to go back to it again because I believe I will find more to the story during a second and even third reading of it. I found this book interesting, even though it was difficult to understand what was happening at times. 

1 comment:

  1. This sounds really interesting. It's always nice when taking a chance on a book pays off!

    Kate @ Ex Libris

    ReplyDelete

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