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It was an exceptional winter.
With deceptive understatement, Orly Castel-Bloom draws back the curtain on her disturbing, revelatory novel set in Israel during the Al Aksa intifada. This is a world already regularly interrupted by terrorist ambushes and suicide bombs. And now it is further plagued—by a Saudi flu that is decimating the population, and by the apocalyptic weather that brings a ruinous winter after eight years of drought. The economy is shot to pieces. Hail stones as big as dinner plates are falling from the sky.
And yet, against this backdrop of monumental affliction, ordinary people are still trying to lead normal lives. Kati Beit-Halahmi, an impoverished cleaner, is snatched up by a community television program and given her full fifteen-minutes-of-fame. Iris Ventura, divorced with three children, is wondering how she can afford both to replace her broken washing machine and have some essential dental work done. And the Israeli president, Reuven Tekoa, travels from hospital to funeral, musing on the state of the nation from the back of his limousine.
Orly Castel-Bloom spins a web of filament-fine connections between her characters, whose preoccupations, she reminds us, are not so very different from our own. Death or disaster might intrude at any moment, but people still watch game shows on TV, go to the laundromat and train to be beauticians.
Holding a mirror up to her country, Castel-Bloom show us a society in microcosm, struggling for continuity and normalcy in a fractured world. Sardonic, topical and wholly engrossing, this is a novel capturing the maelstrom of impossible contradictions that is Israeli life today.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Jeffery Paetz
reviewed Human Parts on June 20, 2011 Human Parts
Wow. After reading Dolly City, I knew I had to read more of Castel-Bloom's work. For me, Dolly City was an intriguing but difficult read. I knew there were layers of meaning and metaphor but felt ignorant of what most of it actually signified. Human Parts made more sense to me, perhaps because it works in the opposite way of Dolly City. While Dolly City is obscure, with the message buried beneath layers of imagery and characterization, in Human Parts the message, meaning, story and characters seem to function all together at the same level (that's not to say that you can't read into Castel-Bloom's writing at multiple levels). Everything just works. Everything is seamless. Human Parts is an incredibly powerful story, both as a testament to human suffering and survival and to Israeli life specifically. Definitely a great read.
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Add Human Parts, It was an exceptional winter. With deceptive understatement, Orly Castel-Bloom draws back the curtain on her disturbing, revelatory novel set in Israel during the Al Aksa intifada. This is a world already regularly interrupted by terrorist ambus, Human Parts to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Human Parts, It was an exceptional winter. With deceptive understatement, Orly Castel-Bloom draws back the curtain on her disturbing, revelatory novel set in Israel during the Al Aksa intifada. This is a world already regularly interrupted by terrorist ambus, Human Parts to your collection on WonderClub |
