Customer Reviews

The Dybbuk in Love

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Sonya Taaffe, The Dybbuk in Love (Prime, 2005)

"If anything, she had still expected a character from old photographs and Yiddish literature, a sallow yeshiva student in his scholar's black and white fringes, a prayer for every occasion calligraphed onto his tongue and no more experience of women than the first, promised glimpse of his arranged bride. Bowed over pages so crammed with commentary upon commentary that the candlelight could scarcely find room to dance pale among the flickering letters, nights spent with the smells of burned-down wax and feather ticking, dreaming of angels that climbed up and down ropes of prayer, demons that drifted like an incense of malice down the darkened wind."

This passage, from about halfway through Taaffe's short novella The Dybbuk in Love, is a perfect illustration of why you should be reading Sonya Taaffe. What her exquisite stories are about takes a back stage to the fact that they are exquisite, small written gems that roll off the tongue and into the memory. But, for those of you who are still plot-dependent, what we have here is a simple love story, albeit one between a twenty-first-century girl and a boy who died a hundred years previous, the kind of guy who won't let something as silly as incorporeality get in the way of being with the one he loves; he'll just wander in and borrow someone else's body for a while. Which sounds a lot creepier than Taaffe writes it; I'm serious, this is a love story, a romance even, not a horror story. But, like all good love stories, it's got a slightly different spin to make it something new. And new this is.

No big surprise that I loved a Sonya Taaffe book. The only surprise, for me, is that more people haven't discovered her. **** ½