Synopses & Reviews
A whirlwind of art, music, and lust, is Yoram Kaniuk's overwhelming autobiographical novel detailing his years as a young painter in the New York of the '50s. Wounded and alienated, a war veteran at the age of nineteen, Kaniuk arrives in Greenwich Village at its peak period of artistic creativity, and finds his way among such giants as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Sinatra. In terse prose, inspired by the associative and breathless drive of bebop, Kaniuk's memories race between the ecstatic devotion of his beloved Harlem jazz clubs, through the ideological spats of the dying Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, to the volcanic gush of passion, pain, art, dance, alcohol, and drugs that was Greenwich Village. Kaniuk's stories roll and tumble here with hypnotic urgency, as if this were his last opportunity to remember, and tell, before all is obliterated.
Synopsis
I am convinced that he is one of the masters of contemporary fiction. There is his inordinate technical skill, fecundity of incident and character, and overall intensity.The problems posed by Yoram Kaniuk go to the heart of modern man’s deepest longings and emotional needs. His keen vision is unhesitatingly centered on what history may regard as the most characteristic experience of our unfortunate age, and this is true of few writers today. He is an enormous talent, both as an artificer of plot and as a virtuoso of language.
Synopsis
Susan Sontag writes: "Of the novelists I have discovered in translation . . . the three for whom I have the greatest admiration are Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Handke, and Yoram Kaniuk."
About the Author
Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. A novelist, painter, and journalist, Kaniuk has published more than thirty books of fiction and cultural commentary, including the novel The Last Jew, which appeared in English translation in 2006. A feature film based on his novel Adam Resurrected was released in 2008 to great critical acclaim.Anthony Berris was born in the UK and has lived in Israel for most of his life, working as a teacher and freelance translator.