See Under: LOVE: A Novel

This is not a book for the casual reader and I had no idea of the roller coaster ride it was was going to be. It is dense, disturbing, convoluted and delves into the territory that is thought of as "magic realism". Primarily, it deals with the holocaust, not a pleasant topic at any time. But I have never read anything that ever comes close to this writer's deep, complex and highly imaginative world view.The book is divided into four sections. The first is set in Israel in 1959 with a 9-year-old boy named Momik. His parents and everyone around him are holocaust survivors. They are emotionally scarred and never discuss the topic with him. But he hears whispers, and phases like "the Nazi beast" make him think there is an animal of that name. This section is written in a stream of consciousness inner dialog and really felt like it was coming from a young boy. His sentences are long, some of the taking up a whole page, but they are imaginatively conceived and paint a picture of the inner workings of his mind.The next section is harder to understand. By now, Momik is grown and has a wife and a baby. During this time, he is researching the death of Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish writer who was killed by the Nazis. There is a lot of magic realism here and the author goes a little wild with Momik's searching under the sea and observing an underwater unreal world.The third section was, to me the most interesting as well as the most horrifying. This is a flashback about Momik's great uncle, Wassernan, a writer of children's tales, who we first meet as a confused elderly old man in the first section. Here, he has just been transported to a concentration camp and is confronted with a Nazi commander who was acquainted with his captive's early writing. The Nazi commander keeps the writer alive so that he can create a story with the same characters that he had developed so many years ago. What follows is a Sheherizade tale with a twist because lines of power get blurred between the Nazi and the Jew.The last section is a dictionary/encyclopedia, where the author elaborates in great detail on a variety of words and phrases. Here is where his imagination really soars. The one word I can use to describe this is "fascinating".This is the most complex book I have ever read. I loved it and hated it and couldn't put it down. It took me to places inside myself that I never knew existed. And it made me admire the absolute genius of the author. Of course, it is not for everyone. I just know that, even though there was much of it I didn't understand, I was standing in the shadow of greatness. And I will never forget it.

See Under: LoveHow can one tell of the Holocaust. There have been many volumes written, containing facts, statistics, pictures, and personal accounts. But the sheer horror of it often paralyses one's reactions to: stop I can't stand it read any more and in the end it is too grotesque to be real. David Grossman, using fantasy and symbolism and humor made it more real for me than anything I have ever read or heard about on the subject.In the first chapter he used his consummate skill to evoke it, by being able to `get into the head' of a 9 year old Israeli boy whose immigrant parents would not tell him what the Holocaust was. Momik is a clever nine year old, trying to figure out what happened `Over There', and his Holocaust survivor friends and relatives are funny and, at the same time, infinitely sad. He and his escapades capture your heart.The chapter on Bruno is an allegory of resistance to the slaughter of the Jews, in particular Bruno Schulz, a gifted Polish-Jewish writer. In this tale, he escapes the Nazis by becoming and swimming with the salmon, Grossman's symbol for the `wandering Jews'.The third chapter is about Wasserman, a Jew in a concentration camp, who had written children's stories before the war which happened to be the favorites of the camp's commandant when he was a child. Wasserman had the statistical distinction, out of the millions who were slaughtered, of being the one improbable person who could not be killed, either by gas chamber or pistol. It is filled with dark humor as Wasserman becomes the Scheherazade of the commandant, continuing his stories each night, with the request that he be killed after each recital. But of course he couldn't be killed.The final chapter is an encyclopedia, in which the title - See Under: Love is a cross reference. I couldn't finish this chapter. It was too awful for me.This book is bold, poetic and passionate. I consider this the best, the most important book I have ever read.

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So, I shall be the first reviewer not to give this book a gushy, five-star review. The reason? When the New York Times said of this book that it was "as magical and as resonant as works by Garcia Marquez or Grass" the reviewer was all too accurate. Put simply, if you fancy "magical realism" - which as far as I'm concerned is neither: magical or realistic - then you will absolutely love this book: a long, subaqueous dialogue with the sea personified as a strumpet, what I suppose could be called 1,001 Nights in a Concentration Camp where the immortal inmate Wasserman spins absurd tales to the warden who shot his daughter about all manner of madcap things. And, finally, a lexicon of sorts that goes out of its way not to define but to be as jolly obfuscatory as possible.If this sounds like your cup of silliness, and you love Marquez and the cult of magical realism, then you shall be singing the praises of this piece of literary absurdity Grossman has dreamed up in this book as do all the other reviewers. My being the first reviewer to dare criticise it here no doubt has something, perhaps everything, to do with the fact that its subject is the Holocaust and that it was translated from the Hebrew of an acclaimed Israeli author. So, I shall address this aspect: What this book does, in fact, is to trivialise the Holocaust. All these claims for this novel as a work of "redemption" quite literally make me ill. Anyone who thinks that this stew of magical-realistic mumbo-jumbo interspersed with Polish, Yiddish and German discourse, abrim with imaginary sea creatures, "scream machines," and too many other dotty inventions to list in this review in any manner "redeems" the deaths of 6,000,000 persons is putting a literary blindfold over their eyes and turning away from history.Words are indeed powerful. But omnipotent they are not.

This book is very very strange. I read it after it was kind of recommended in A History of the Rain by Niall Williams . It is divided into three parts. If you are not Jewish the first part is very difficult to read on an old kindle as the glossary is at the back There were so very many words I didnt know the meaning of, it meant reading was hard work. The second section is very fishy. It is just bonkers. Third section I enjoyed, . The picture of a candle in a radish will stay with me. I think it was worth struggling through parts one and two to get to the part I could understand ; but Im not sure. If life was longer I would reread it in an effort to understand more, but as it is I was quite glad to finish it. Good luck

How Wonderful is this it took me to the heart Of who and what a story teller is and what purpose he has in human existence. I will never forget this book. It is deep profound and shocking.

Book arrived in super time.

Brilliant buy

Absolutely loved this - what a fantastic storyteller