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From the Nobel laureate, author of Night, a searing new novel about a man whose life is shaped by his changing grasp of the horrors of the twentieth century.
Doriel, a European orphan transplanted to New York, carries with him a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a resistance leader during World War II, survived the war but soon afterward died in a car crash with Doriel s father. His longing for his parents and their secrets haunt him, leaving him unable to experience the most basic joys in life. A gifted psychoanalyst helps bring him to a crossroads: to a shocking discovery about his mother s life and his own birth, and to the understanding that even the most intimate of wounds can be healed.
From the Compact Disc edition.
The book's style and themes will be familiar to those acquainted with his previous fiction…yet A Mad Desire to Dance shows the sensibility of a literary wanderer who has not finished searching for answers to his original anguished questions…The novel's grim satisfactions lie in a sense of shared responsibility between teller and listener, a confidential yet far-reaching partnership that began four decades ago with Night.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Norbert Matthias Karl
reviewed A Mad Desire to Dance on December 19, 2011
A Mad Desire to Dance
Rating: 3.5* of five
Like any other Wiesel book, this is well worth reading. Don't be put off by the philosophy-student-at-2am first 50pp. Chapter 3, starting on p51, begins a different phase of the book and it's a much less claustrophobic experience after that.
Wiesel is justly famous for the memoir "Night". He's not a novelist, frankly, and a less talented writer would have turned this same story into the literary equivalent of waterboarding. Things like, "At times, in an involuntary and unpredictable way, everything spins around and becomes dislocated in my mind. At the slightest little thing, and often for no apparent reason, I weep without shedding tears and I roar with laughter. I'm lonely, terribly lonely, though a crowd surrounds me and hems me in{,}" are...well...clunky, to put it kindly. (That is from p140, the beginning of chapter 12.)
But...and here's the thing...there are passages that soar and look down at us, seeing sharp edges and stark corners where we see fuzz, mist, and shadows: "Against a world invaded by madness, should we use the faith of our ancestors, or our own madness?" (p110) And this is a simple throwaway line in a long dialogue paragraph!
I can almost forgive the non-novel-ness of the book for moments like that. I recommend the book to readers of Robert Pirsig's philosophical maunderings as a corrective, and to readers of Wiesel's own memoir as an act of solidarity with a man whose world contains so much that he can't keep it in, gotta let it out (to quote Stephen Georgiou/Cat Stevens).
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