Customer Reviews

Journey to the End of the Millennium

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read "A Journey to the End of the Millenium" several months ago and even now it still sits clearly etched in my mind as one of the most enjoyable and astounding reads in recent memory. I recommended it to one very special friend and she too felt that way. Yehoshua's gift is to take us back to a time and a place so different than our modern times and gently and humorously and with vivid detail lead us into this world. Nothing is taken for granted and we are introduced to the smells, sights, winds, nature, food,travel and people's attitudes about love, health, death, sex, spirituality, clothes, justice, kindness and everything else that is of importance now and 1,000 years ago. NOthing is omitted. It is so well "painted" that it almost feels as if he was there or at least was talking to his very real characters over time. Yehoshua deals with such spiritual themes as "loshon hora" or evil tongue both between Jews and Jews and Jews and Gentiles, treating one's spouse(s), fair business dealings, Jewish ritual, and justice both religous and civil. He deals with the Ashkenazic/Sephardic relationship in a way that illustrates the deep rootededness of some of the differences. All of this takes place over the course of a trip from the Sephardic regions of North Africa through Spain, France and into Eastern Europe. Of course, it is at the eve of the Crusades and arguably a dark age so the story is fraught with a real sense of danger and adventure. There is also, as I experienced it, a continual dichotomy between the forces of enlightenment and darkness in the story. It is unusual to read a book with enough "soul" to make you feel persoanlly uplifted all wrapped up in a hugely entertaining story. One of the best historical novels I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Obviously the author's humor, style and skill came through the translator perfectly. I wholeheartedly recommend this book and it has started me on a journey of Mr. Yehoshua's work.

I've been struggling with this book in conjunction with Mr Mani, as part of a paper on Sephardic identity in the writing of A B Yehoshua. Strangely, I find myself agreeing with both the positive and negative reviews - which strongly suggests that the book is a bit of a curate's egg, good in parts! As with Mr Mani, the historical detail is excellent. Even given the tedious nature of a narrative style with no dialogue, ABY succeeds in painting a tremendously powerful and engaging portrait of the Mediterranean and North European world of 999 AD, As an historical epic, if you can get past the boredom threshold somewhere around the middle of the book, it succeeds quite well. But ABY's forte is in the internal journey into the human psyche. Mr Mani is an excellent example - probably the best - of ABY's virtuosity at peeling off the layers of human motivation in all their complexity and, very often, perversity. In contrast, this novel depicts a somewhat stereotyped cultural clash between individuals. Anyone familiar with Israeli literature in the past 25 years will also be familiar with the general thrust of the argument. Ashkenazi culture denies the depth and breadth of Sephardi culture. It ignores the cultural heritage of Sephardi Jews, which certainly up to the first millenium and well beyond, held sway over Ashkenazi Jewry. Ashkenazi culture has a tendency to introversion and rejection,whereas Sephardi culture is expansive and interactive, especially with regard to Islam... and so on, and so forth. The hegemonic Ashkenazic view of Sephardi history and culture has been comprehensively deconstructed over the last twenty five years - why go over this ground, especially when in Mr Mani he has already 'deconstructed the deconstruction' by dissecting the history and psychopathology of a high status Sephardi family so comprehensively and brilliantly? As for the dual marriage thing, well I think there's a limit to most people's cultural relativism - especially most women's! It just doesn't work, not as love story and certainly not as erotic writing. Its unlike ABY to fob us off with stereoyped based narrative in order to score ideological points. So... a reasonably good read, but well below top form for the master.

Many of the other reviewers here must be too young to understand the important topics at hand. There are too many of them to be discussed here, but let me give you one, just for instance.

Why are the names of the wives not revealed? As you get deeper into the novel you realize that the two wives are the same wife, the only wife. A man who truly loves a woman loves her for what she truly is, her essence.

If you are an older woman, you will know that you are not just who you are now, but also who you were then, a younger woman still existing in the old, despite appearences. And the carnal and the spiritual exist together in the essence.

Also, on another level, this is an historic tale of 999, when many Christians predicted the end of the world and an extermination of non-believers, when many held to the letter of the Holy Scripture as a justification of owning slaves and multiple wives. This book takes a sharp look at the conflict between tradition and the evolution of law, and helps us bring current conflicts into focus.

Yehoshua is a something of a magician, a master of misdirection who hides the duality of his intent until the reader is ready. Then everything clicks into place. This is a novel you'll want to read again just to see how he does it.

This novel is one of rich prose, beautifully drawn characters and exotic images. In it, the Yehoshua presents a view of 10th century Europe and the interaction of people unexpectedly flung about by the interactions of their cultural points of view. The sensations are strong: exotic scenes of African culture being transported to Europe, sensual couplings, inter- and intra religious conflict, the destruction of close relationships. In the novel, a Morrocan Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, travels with his two wives to Paris intent on salvaging his personal and business relationship with his nephew, Abulafia, now a resident of Paris and recently married to a Jewess from what is now Germany. Because Ben Attar is a bigamist, Abulafia's wife insists that their business and personal relationship be ended. During the sea voyage to Europe, Yehoshua eloquently describes the culture of the Morrocan Jew: flexible, tolerant and richly sensual. However, when the African and European cultures meet face to face, there are profound and sometimes terrible consequences, some of them never to be reversed. Throughout, the the writing is subtle and elegant, and the book has layer upon layer of meaning which the author leaves to the reader to interpret. Although the book has specific Jewish content, the ideas and story are also secular. It was a treat to read and I was left wanting more. Serious and thought-provoking writing.

I approached "A Journey to the End of the Millennium" eagerly. Since the book was subtitled "A Novel of the Middle Ages," I anticipated a compelling story that would illuminate the times, flowing from a talented writer's fertile imagination. Perhaps the subtitle is actually a typo for "A Novel of Middle Age," which strikes me as more appropriate. Instead of painting a landscape rooted in a specific time and place, the author's concerns and energies are focused on the domestic and commercial travails of a middle-aged merchant. We follow him as he seeks to legitimatize his enlightened domestic situation of having two wives in benighted Europe, saving a business partnership in the process. Predictably, one of the wives has to die to normalize the other relationships. Guess whether the young nubile wife or the older chubbier wife dies. Your answer gives a flavor for the tediousness of this text.

The timelessness that many reviewers find a strength of the novel was, for me, a disappointing drawback. Granted, the measure of time is arbitrary and human concerns and relationships are universal and timeless, but this commonplace insight is hardly robust enough to carry the book.

The author's style is at times promising, but the text does not approach a literary height. Rather than drawing the reader in and focusing a close examination of the implications hidden or obscured in the text, Yehoshua provided me with an exercise in tedium. This is one of those books I wanted to put aside halfway finished, but hesitated to do so in hopes of a revelation that never comes. I am frankly puzzled why so many reviewers found this book compelling.

Unfortunately, this was the first book I read by Yehoshua. Unless someone convinces me otherwise, it will be the last. Even a great writer can produce an unworthy book. Others more familiar with his canon will have to decide if that is the case here.

A.B. Yehoshua has produced some of the greatest novels of the last quarter of the twentieth century. This, however, is not one of them. Taking place near the end of the first millennium, it deals with the culture clash between Mediterranean Sephardic Jews and Northern European Ashkenazi Jews. A few decades before the events of this book take place the latter banned polygamy while the former still allowed it. A quarrel arises between Ben Attar, the Sephardic merchant who is the protagonist of this book and who has two wives, and the wife of his nephew who lives in Northern Europe. She wants the business partnership between the uncle and nephew repudiated because of Ben Attar's polygamy. Ben Attar thus travels to Northern Europe with a Spanish rabbi to argue the case for polygamy.

Yehoshua's previous works such as A Late Divorce and Mr. Mani showed him to be master a dialogue and interior monologue. In this book, however, he has deliberately eschewed those methods. Instead what we have is sentence after sentence, each one embroidered with several subordinate and dependant clauses. Unfortunately these sentences are not rich in imagery, like those in Garcia Marquez or Herman Broch. They are not wittily allusive like the narrators in Jose Saramago. Nor are they finely nuanced and subtle like Henry James. Nor are they the objective correlative of some psychological state, the way the endless sentences in The Autumn of the Patriarch are the correlative of a vicious and endless dicatorship. They just seem to be a literary exercise, ultimately artificial, like stories which always exclude the letter "e". There is a therefore a considerable loss in psychological depth and acuity, with no corresponding gain in literary craftmanship and form. Judge for yourself from the following sentences: "When Master Levitas felt that his usually firm hand was trembling slightly under the burning books coming from behind the fine veils, he allowed himself to blush a little and to smile shyly into his little beard, before hastily drawing out of his folds of his robe a red leather-bound prayerbook in Amram Gaon's edition, which he wanted to compare with the one in Ben Attar's bag, which turned out to be in the edition by Saadia Gaon." "But the dripping of the rain on the canvas cover gave him no rest, and fetched him out of his bed to see whether the Ishmaelite wagoners required more covering." And could go on, but why should Yehoshua bother?

But style is only the least of Yehoshua's problems. There is a vaguely comedic and erotic tone to the book, which is not helped by the herds of subordinate clauses, nor by the fact that Yehoshua has never really demonstrated a fine sense of humour. There's nothing worse than a ponderous sex farce. And there is a pervading obviousness about much of the book. The rabbi's son eats pork and becomes ill, a black slave is seduced by three European women, by chance the party wonders through Verdun and the Somme 917 years before they became World War one bloodbaths. And one should point out the sex scenes which for Yehoshua's sake one can only hope will soon be forgotten. Nor is the message of the book very thoughtful, since it amounts to saying that sex is generally a good idea and is unavoidable. Only in the last third of the book, where one of the characters becomes seriously ill does a sense of gravitas belatedly return. But by then it is too late to save the novel.

Yeah, yeah, so his prose is beautiful. But how much of this long-winded writing is the reader supposed to endure? I liked the first half of the book very much, but then I kept thinking, "Get to the point, already!" (And he never really did in some ways. We never found out in any specific way what happened when Jesus didn't make his reappearance, or even why this book needed to be set in 999.) It never occurred to me until I read other Amazon reviewers that the wives had no names. Duh! But this is a fable after all and in 999 maybe wives' names were less important. I found the characters very interesting, but really struggled to finish the book. Yehoshua is a very creative writer, trying new techniques in each of his books, but a novel without dialogue is hard to carry off successfully.

Some members of my book group found the language and complex sentence structure challenging or even slow going at first. But my own reaction was that the writing was both beautiful and (presumably) intended to evoke to some degree the profoundly different pace and feeling of life in the 10th century -- and it seems to do so. There is, I think, a subtle strain of humor that challenges a reader to discover it. Note: it is interesting to consider some of the evocations of events that were to occur in the 20th century, particularly the two great wars, and some similarities between this book and Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts", written on the eve of the second World War. The ambiguity of the ending stimulated much discussion. I found it more bleak than others wanted to acknowledge.

Opinion among reviewers appears to be polarized, as many praise the book as find it highly unsatisfactory. I am well into the latter category.

Others have summarized the story. I found the central plot line to be so incredible as to be beyond reason, so much so, in fact, that my main motivation for continuing to read was to determine whether he really meant what he seemed to be saying. Yehoshua describes a medieval mid-European Jewess who first attempts to break up her husband's business partnership, then threatens divorce, because her husband's partner, who lives a thousand miles away in a Moslem country, has two wives. He never satisfactorily explains why she goes to these extremes. Further, he never adequately explains why the business partner would undertake the extremely hazardous journey from Africa to mid-Europe bringing along both his wives, and others, to confront the complainant. Finally, the ease with which one of the travelers, a widowed Rabbi, leaves his son in the hands of the complainant when the party returns to Africa, defies all belief.

The writing has merits but all the characters are paper thin and one dimensional. Further, emotions are described in terms worthy of the Barbara Cartland school: people do not simply want something, their hearts long for it; they do not question but are darkly suspicious; they do not look at each other but caress with their eyes; they are not just upset but pierced to their soul, and so on and on.

Finally, the novel's title would lead one to expect that there is major significance in its setting, the year 999 CE. However, apart from some minor references to the millennium the events described could equally well have occurred at any time during the preceding or subsequent 150 years.

What's the point?

I believe that I was possibly unlucky to choose this book as my introduction to Mr. Yehoshua's work, for I am told that he is a fabulous writer and a fine creator of believable dialogues. Well, there are no dialogues, and the story drags. The book however had many characteristics that should make me love it! My training is that of a historian, I fancy -- in my spare time -- reading on the Middle Ages, I've been fascinated with travel writing, I've lived in North Africa and to top it off, I've done some reading on Judaism in the Iberian Penninsula. And yet this book proved to be a collection of frustrations and it appeared never to end.

Mr. Yehoshua chose to base his narrative in the oral tradition typical not only to the Middle Ages but also present in Jewish and North African traditions. So the development of his story is as repetitive as those told from generation to generation, to remind each of the listeners the main characteristcs of what's being mentioned. He does it however without the charm that a colloquial narrator would infuse. This distant omnipresent narrator who tells us the story instead took away any sense of drama, of importance, of eagerness, and of deeply felt conflicts. The narrative line seemed adrift, like a boat going from port to port without a chart.

There was also not a single character that involved this reader emotionally. It felt like an intellectual exercise that ended up being too boring to stand. It was a struggle for me to finish the book and frankly, life is too short for the daily sacrifice I was inflicting on myself.