Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107742 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-16
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Synopsis
Kaddish Poznan chips the names off gravestones for a living, removing traces of disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian works in insurance, earning money when people live longer than they fear. Set in a tumultuous Buenos Aires on the cusp of a military coup, the couple's own turbulent relationship is held together by their role as parents dedicated to a teenage son. As Argentina's Dirty War unfolds around them, it threatens to overwhelm the infectious, mad energy of their lives. A visit to the dreaded Ministry of Special Cases soon turns their at times hilarious misadventures into something much darker.

Customer Reviews

In the dark
This is a good - and sometimes very funny - book on a frightening subject. We're set up with a typically dysfunctional family in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Lillian, the mother, works for an insurance broker. Pato, the son, is a student. He argues with his father, hangs out with his friends, goes to lectures. So far, so normal.

But Kaddish, the father, spends his nights chipping the names off gravestones, paid by the descendants of the dead who don't want their antecedents to be tracked down to a disreputable graveyard. People, especially Jewish people like Kaddish and Lillian, are anxious to blend in, look respectable, not be noticed. This is Argentina, in the mid-70s, with students vanishing into thin air.

Pato gets noticed: the reader knows exactly where he's off to (thin air). The focus, though, is not on Pato but on his parents, what they do, how they respond. Kaddish's name is a clue in itself, the kaddish being the Jewish prayer in memory of the dead.

Having read Englander's short story collection ('For the Relief of Unbearable Urges') I kept expecting to be gripped, but I wasn't. I found it reasonably readable, but the people and the places aren't drawn particularly clearly: I felt I was trying to see in the dark that Kaddish works in. Sometimes the characters antics veered too far into the absurd to be credible. Even so, I'm glad I read it, and I think I'll remember it, mostly because the parents' agonised emotions are drawn with such clarity and vigour.

Extraordinary underrated novel
The promise of Nathan Englander's collection of short stories For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is fulfilled with his first novel. Very few authors can achieve such a haunting conflation of comedy and tragedy as Englander. No better example can be found than his short story Tumblers--who would have thought that the Holocaust and circus performers could be brought together in a story both shocking and hilarious. Well, he has done it again with this novel but on a much grander scale. Argentina in the time of the Generals and the disappeared is at the beginning only a backdrop to the domestic comedy of the Poznan family, Kaddish, Lillian and Pato, but it soon creeps into their lives despite denial and the installation of a door designed to keep dangers at bay. The domestic comedy ebbs into a domestic tragedy that is at once unexpected and inevitable. The Poznans, already outsiders in the Jewish community, now become outsiders in their own country as well. The characterisations are marvellous--Lillian, Kaddish and Pato come to life on the page and the menagerie of minor characters is beautifully realised. Englander is a major novelist in the making and this is the best book I've read in 2007.