Customer Reviews

The Name

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Reading Michal Govrin's "The Name" was a singular experience that turned into a powerful personal journey. My shock started with the first words of the book... a novel that opens with an ancient mystical prayer! And what an intimate and erotic prayer it is! I never knew Jewish liturgy and imagination had such and an overwhelming power. As I was carried by this capturing book, I could feel it in my body. Amalia's (the narrator's) voice and her ghosts inhabited me. It stirred in me the open question of how to remember a trauma - the Holocaust. Is it possible? Isn't any narrative trying to tell the horror doomed to failure? Woven into this experience were the stunning landscapes of Jerusalem by day and night, and the evocation of its crowded religious festivals. I recommend this book with all my enthusiasm. It's a spiritual, sensual, and philosophical discovery. One that marks both your soul and body.

Michal Govrin is a poet, novbelist., theatre diector, with a philosophical sense of space and the sacred. She renders a dazzling narrative here like a fine sacred curtain. On the one hand, she gives us a literal and furious narrative of suspense concerning the Holocaust and history and a woman who must choose between ways of life, ways of ritual, paths of sacrifice. Govrin is full of finesse in renderiung the stones of Jerusalem and the sensuality of Soho in New York, the snapshot aesthetic of an artworld, and the densest counting of hallakah (Jewish law). Her writing rises to a symbolist precision in her dark momentum. She transdfigures the ordinary, so that we hear not a violin-tone but an entire relation through music. She has learned from the poets and the book has the forward motion of a Duras recit. But what Govrin adds is a resonance on the allegorical, even the final, anaogical, philosophical "plane.," in which her characters rep[resent both themselves and yet are typologies at once poilitical, poetic, and philosophical. Govrin attempts to resolve for us without false dissolution the nature of sacrifice. She attempts throughout this novel to stare at the plentitufde of Judaism as if it were the abyss. And plenitude is the nature of this novbel, where Govrinb finally achieves an immense pattern of forgiveness. A novel that emerhges from the strong weakness of Beckett casts itsshadows in a wider and wider cirucmference. I keep this book beside me, because it releases its life slowly and with charm. The reviewers do not do it justice, because our culture wants either merely a poror snapshot (naturalism) or is easily enraged by the sudden focus of such a snapshot (antinaturalism)./ In Govrin we have the full style of Proust: a memoir, not a diary, a novel, not a melody, phrases that haunt us, language that is golden, and always the human in trouble. How pleased we are that Barbara Harshav has completed this wonderful translation in living English, and that now readers in America can taste, if they want, a forbidden fruit: the radiant intelligence of one of Israeli's wise women.

... It's a murky, rambling, frustrating book. Though I suppose it might appeal to some people who can put up its dense style, keep in mind it's certainly not an easy read.

Besides the style, the content is also bizarre. As a religious Jew myself, I expected to identify with this book. Nothing could be further from the truth. The characters are obsessive-compulsive, unhappy and fanatical, and Judaism's appeal to the main character seems to be in providing a set of rules and prayers with which she can torture herself. The book's religious references seemed arbitrary to me - Govrin quotes a mish-mash of Jewish prayers at random - and her description of one of the rabbis goes totally against traditional Judaism. (Govrin doesn't seem to have a problem only with Orthodox Jews: her secular characters are equally odd and unbelievable.)

I can't believe this book won the Israel Prize - ... I also wonder if this translation is off.

How on earth did this book ever get published. I don't know whether it's the translation that's the problem or whether it just needed a much better translator and editor. It's all over the place and while I enjoy a surrealistic or experimental approach I think this needed a good edit or rewrite or a better translator. I found much of the imagery etc in it jarring and it just didn't work, in English anyway. It seemed like a work in progress by a student of creative writing.

I think it had a lot of potential - the author has done a lot of research and put an enormous amount of work into it, but quite frankly I got about 1/3 of the way thru it and gave up. I'm glad I didn't buy it but borrowed it from my local library.

I recently saw the author on a panel discussion at a Writer's Festival and did expect something better from her writing.

Naomi Lyons

I think this book is more slow than a turtle. When I read the book description I was very interested and I bouth it, but it turn out that this hole book could have been said in just one chapter. I had the impresion that I was not moving on with the story as I kept reading. There was way to much description and no dialogs at all. To coplicatly written and if the author tried to say something here I did not andurstand what it was.