The Heart is Katmandu [Paperback]

Yoel] Cole, Peter, translator [Hoffmann (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: New Directions, 2001 (2001)
• ASIN: B000J0NJ4K
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a reluctant 5 but if you don't read Hoffman ..., May 19, 2002

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Heart is Katmandu (Hardcover)

Thru the first fifth or so of these book, I thought I may have finally found a book by Yoel Hoffmann that I didn't love. Because of that, I would strongly urge anyone who has read nothing of Hoffmann's to begin with "Katschen & The Book of Joseph" rather than this book.

In the small units (chapters? prose poems? fragments?) that make up this book, Hoffman builds an understanding (an impression? an empathy?) for the experience of falling in love. This woman loves man loves woman loves child loves mother ... story builds within the individual characters, within the world, within the religious universe in unusual connections: "Now his life, too, seems like a story, except that here there occur the same eruptions that take place on the surface of the sun, and he hears the sound of this burning, like the song which is of this world alone: 'Frere Jacques.'"

While occasionally a line or image seems contrived in a way not evident in his other works, the results are astonishing. At the novel's end the reader has seen barriers and loneliness fall away and love flow in to replace them. This love is physical, sacred and profane as is the world within which the characters live limited (or not?) by time, space, contradition and naming.