Reviews for A Mad Desire to Dance

The average rating for A Mad Desire to Dance based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-10 00:00:00 Charles Johnson I made a drastic decision with this one: I stopped reading and tossed it aside. Now, that's something I usually don't do. Even if I don't like a novel, I seem to find the stamina to push through. I just couldn't go on with this one. There's nothing that appeals to me. At. All. During my read I hit a wall, three times. I paused my reading, and read another book, just to get going again. Today I returned to the book for a fourth time. Determined to push it to end. After some 20 pages, every joy I find in reading was slowly withering. After 25 pages I was questioning the very act of reading itself. (I'm a literary historian. My whole life revolves around reading, so you can only guess my state of mind when I start to doubt the virtues of reading) After 30 pages, I was ready to sell my soul to the devil if I just never had to read another book again. After 35 pages, I decided to leave A Mad Desire to Dance for ever. It was either that, or stabbing my eyes out. I chose the first, and I'm off to rekindle my love for literature. You might have figured it out by now, but this one is really not my cup of tea. We meet with the protagonist and his quest for mental health. He's off to a therapist, and is going to tell his story. Well... More or less. Fragments of texts are told devoid of any chronology. Madness is thematized throughout the novel, even in its form. Yes, very cute and clever and all, but it doesn't really make up for an engaging read. Even the therapist herself is entering the discourse of madness. Yes, really cute. Really Clever. Not a great story. So, all in all, I must say, this book is very cute and very clever. But in the end, it makes up for nothing. The self-absorbed characters and the self-absorbed text repelled me on every level. There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in this book that appeals to me. If you'd like to read a book about jewishness, in a therapeutical setting, go and read Philip Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint'. I beg of you, run away from this one before it sucks every joie de lire out of you.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-19 00:00:00 Norbert Matthias Karl 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).