Book Reviews - Cities in the Sky

Demian and The Yiddish Policemen's Union

This month Tati and I read both Demian, by Herman Hesse, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon. Two very different books, yet both mention seeing cities in the sky.

My previous experience with Herman Hesse was Siddartha, which like most required reading in high school, was dismissed out of hand. I found Demian sitting apart from the piles of books that lurk in the corners of Waverly, my uncle's house. By Ethan's reckoning it came to rest on the bench just inside the door after having spent two weeks in the front garden. By dint of Garvin's inattention or possibly the water restrictions, it hadn't gotten watered on. It's a plain looking book, white, small, with a strange, half amateurish-looking illustration in reds and browns on the front. So what about it did catch my attention?
The small block of text inside.

"... the face struck me at that moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew, animals could look like that, or trees, or planets..."

The book is short, and the story weaves languidly through dreams, memories and allegory. At the center of everything is Demian, a man whose actions more closely resemble an amalgam of academic and spirit guide than a real person.

More strange than the events in the book, which are almost all introspective, is that many of the conclusions that Emil, the voice of the story, come to are things that I myself have just come to realize. A month ago I posted the Philip K Dick speech, in which (if you didn't read it far enough or at all) he eventually spirals to the conclusion that reality has a hidden architecture, and that that structure resembles a Biblical period of time, and that this is the absolute truth of reality. Obviously, I'm apt to disagree that we're constantly spiralling around the death of Christ, so after ruminating over it for a while I decided (unofficially I told myself), that since "absolute truth" is a slippery subject, truth should really only be a measure of how true you are to yourself. The hidden architecture of reality is the architecture of your own mind. If that sounds solipsistic, what I mean is that your reality is bent to your perceptions. So to be true to yourself is to learn the landscape of your mind. Maybe this is edging towards a sort of enlightenment, or at least a sort of awakening.

While I read the book I thought of the artist Franz Marc quite often. So when I finished it chose a painting of his that I thought well represented the story.
Fighting Forms

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't read much in the detective story genre. I spent a few hours on Zach's couch with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, which other than the odd Hardy Boys book in fourth grade is the extent of my world of mystery literature. I have, due to our dear professor Rubenstein, read a lot more Yiddish literature than detective stories.

That said, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is incredibly close in tone to my some of my favorite pieces I read for my Yiddish literature class. It's icy, it's hopeless, it's out of its element, it's wry, it's darkly humorous. Set against the dark Alaskan winter in an alternate reality forty years after the state of Israel is routed before it can take hold, the book takes within its pages a unique and unsettling alloy of Jewish hope, fatalism, and American soul-crushing banality. The result strays too close to suicidally bleak for a summer read. Its moments of action and at times vivid and clear violence are like spot fires on a vast icy plain of tormented actors in a decaying world. Incongruous villains, mobster rebbes, flotsam and jetsam of the Hotel Zamenhof, miracle boys and exiled Zionists, all with an uncertain future.

Really, Isaac Bashevis Singer can be more uplifting.

If this seems like a wholly negative review, then I'll say that the book paints a wonderfully gritty picture with some nicely rounded scoundrels. The voice of the story consistently employs his sharp cynic's wit, and the way some of even the simplest things are described helps infuse each line with acid rancor. Chabon is masterful at creating a really singular point of view.