Masturbating with words
Michael Glover
BE MY KNIFE by David Grossman Bloomsbury, £16. 99, pp. 307. ISBN 0747549524 Abook can make a hole in the wall. It can help us to read reality,' the Israeli novelist David Grossman once said. Weil, yes, But sometimes even bigger holes can be made with a more straightforwardly worldly device — a sledgehammer, for example, Grossman is a novelist who has in the recent past excelled at explicating the tortured nuances of Israeli life through the eyes of young people. In his last novel, The Zig-Zag Kid (1997), a boy on the brink of his bar mitzvah discovers strange truths about his own life when he gets trapped on a train with a master criminal, In the novel before that, The Book of Intimate Grammar (1994), a boy of similar age, short, myopic, awk-ward, retreats into his own private language as he moves towards adulthood. Both these tortured boys talk of themselves as spies. The books themselves are as much about the struggle of Israel to emerge from its bunker mentality as anything else; about Grossman's own perpetually thwarted dreams that, sooner or later, Israel might come to seem as normal a place to live in as any other country not under threat of annihilation by its immediate neighbours.
His new novel presents us, by contrast, with a world of adults. World? Well, not exactly. Just two adults, to be precise. Twothirds of the book consists of a series of letters from a 33-year-old second-hand-book dealer called Yair to his lover Miriam, a schoolteacher who is approaching her 40th birthday. A second section consists of extracts from Miriam's notebook. The third and final section, in the course of which Yair manages to torture his small son to death, is a kind of impassioned telephone conversation between the two of them with inner musings thrown in.
Yair's letters, fragmentary bursts of soulhowling, are as intense and impassioned as anything you might read by, say, Rilke or Kafka — both these writers are mentioned in passing. From time to time, it is almost impossible to know whether the world which Yair is describing exists outside himself and whether that should matter to the reader. Sometimes the letters read like
sequences of tortured hallucinations, barely making sense at all. Yair is desperate to offer Miriam his soul, but he also acknowledges that the account which he is giving of himself consists of a kind of miasma of selfreferential, convoluted verbalisms, 'soulfragments', as he pretentiously calls them. As he remarks on one occasion, he is reassembling reality into a series of words.
All this could be very interesting, and even profound. After all, the intensely selfpreoccupied Rilke can be enormously interesting. Yair is not, though. He simply fails to come alive. We seldom get a glimpse of a concrete world outside these sputtering bursts of self-analysis. He seldom looks at anything or describes anything in an interesting way. Even Miriam is hardly described at all — except in the most vaguely idealistic of ways. On page 197 Yair finally comes clean by saying this: 'Enough. I'm sick of being here, masturbating with words. Why, in this manner I could have you say anything I liked.' That seems spot on.
We learn, quite late on in the book, that he is not even a particularly interesting dealer in second-hand books — perhaps it would have been too disappointing by half to let the reader know sooner. His specialities are biographies of Elvis, various how-to guides, and random volumes of Judaica.
I've bought a sledgehammer from a burly chap I met outside the library, and I'm now looking for a wall to get physical with.
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