Shoes

After the explosion occurred, the shoes dropped from the sky. Some of them took up to a year to drop.

I am speaking, of course, of Joshua Cohen's novel, A Heaven of Others. All the great news in recent weeks about Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey obscured for the moment another terrific book we published this year by an under-35 author, Cohen. Then dropped two more shoes:


1. A powerful long article on A Heaven of Others in The New Haven Review:

(excerpt) "It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction. Foreshadowed by writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz, and poets like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, these myths are fashioned by Cohen out of the baffling vulgarity of modern life in order to make that life personal again and thus open to interpretation: bombs become seeded fruit and foliage a landscape of exploded nails; a pogrom joke in which a fictional shtetl dresses its animals in human clothes and returns to find it repopulated is turned into an allegory for the state of Israel, with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though we may be far from home, tragedy is never far from humor. Like Beckett, after whose beat much of the rhythm is marching, Cohen manages to be serious and wry at the same time, ironic and sincere: “Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again! And, too, that it is not for the living to judge the sacrifices they are bound to make […]” Never again is the slogan of Holocaust remembrance, the refrain of Yom Hazikaron, or the official Israeli Day of Remembrance, on which the last page records this book to have been finished."


2. Mentioned on The Believer short list reader survey of Best Books of 2008, at #14. Behind Morrison, ahead of Millhauser, and in between 2 Bolanos. [scroll down for the whole list]


For more about Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others, released one year ago this past month, see Starcherone or Amazon