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The Nature of Blood

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Life does not exist in a vacuum. Chain of events do occur, relationships about the past and the present exist, and comparisons between various attitudes and time periods can be made. The Nature of Blood, by Caryl Phillips is a very powerful novel that does not just focus on one aspect of a given situation, but does indeed take a more realistic approach on the subject of prejudice by broadening the problem into several distinct but comparable stories. Each story adds a new dimension or nuance to describe this problem that has always existed, and because of this the book evolves into four connecting stories that are somewhat disjoint in the handling of each situation, but ultimately fit into a cohesive pattern.

In the beginning of the novel, the reader may only believe that the book is about the sad character, Eva, who was victimized by the holocaust. Her compelling story is very reminiscent of Schindler's List in the horrific descriptions of life and death in the camps, but with the intimacy of The Diary of Anne Frank in the first-person perspective. Eva, as the only survivor of her immediate family, is transformed from an innocent, naive, and normal girl into a young woman whose words have a deep heaviness and the strange kind of sadness that one has when experiencing that emotion so long that it almost becomes indifference.

As the author switches from Eva to the Jewish bankers of not quite 500 years prior, the reader looks for something that will connect the two stories. The characters themselves are unrelated, the setting quite different with one in Portobuffole and the other in Germany, and the scale of disaster much greater in Eva's Germany. However, there are many commonalities between the stories. Both involve a common people, the Jews, and both stories involve the mass hysteria of the majority people, the Christians in both stories. In Eva's story, the specific reasons for the death camps are never given, but the hysteria of the Germans and the hate that they propagated against the Jews was evident. The story of the Portobuffole Jews, however, evolves mostly around how such an event could build up and occur. Readers are taken step by step through each phase of this tragic story. The Venetian Jews were originally driven from Germany early in the 15th century as they stood accused of causing the plague with their "evil ways". Their condition in Portobuffole, however, is not much improved as they were required to identify themselves as Jewish by the yellow stitching on their clothes and the markers outside their front doors. In times of peace, they were relatively safe as they were in Germany. However, Portobuffole was recovering from famine and the war with the Turks and the citizens were uneasy. The Christians of Portobuffole did not understand the strange customs of the Jews. But, most of all, the largest complaint against the Jews were that they were too much relied upon for money lending. The result of this story is linked across time with the Eva's experience.

These main ideas - a time of hardship and the foreignness of the Jewish to the Christians which leads to harsh persecution against them as scapegoats is also what happened in Eva's Germany. Prejudice leads to hysteria and hysteria to persecution in a time of hardship. It is then understood how such a small event, when taken out of context with the truth twisted about can cause horrible events to happen. From this small, rather isolated event, readers can then judge what happened in the widespread atrocity in Germany. Obviously the stories of Eva and Servadio are linked closely together, but there are also major links between these two stories and Othello's. Readers can assume that Othello's story occurred shortly after Servadio's by no more than about 100 years. Othello discovers the Jewish Ghetto, located just north of St. Marks, ironically the location of the Portobuffole Jews execution. They live there for safety from the Christian Venetians, leaving readers to assume that the hatred and persecution of the Jews among the Venetians only began with the events in Portobuffole. Their safety after that event must have been deeply in question for them to be restricted to such an area for their own sakes. As Othello related, "Apparently, most of the Jews did not regard this arrangement of being locked behind gates from sunset to sunrise a hardship, for it afforded them protection against the many cold hearts that opposed their people". A similar statement is made by Eva when she says, "I walk close to the barbed-wire fence and peer at the world beyond the camp. I touch the fence. I know where I am. I am suddenly appalled to realize that I am comfortable being confined. To remove the wire seems unthinkable".

The story that seems most out of place in the fabric of the novel is that of Malka. Although there is obviously a tie between her and Eva in the character of Stephan, many other things seem at first to be unrelated. The easiest connection is that of Malka and Othello. Both are foreigners in a new, more advanced land, and both converts of the majority religion of that foreign land. They are both from Africa, with Othello being a Moor and Malka an Ethiopian, and as such are discriminated against on the basis of their skin color. Like the subplots of Eva and Servadio, these two are tied together by years - Malka's occurring in the later 20th century, and Othello's in the late 1500's to early 1600's. These two plots embody the more general prejudices of a society without outright persecution.

Obviously the tie between these two subplots are great, but there is also a subtle connection, beyond Stephan, of Malka and Eva, especially in the description of Malka's departure from her homeland: "...And then you herded us on to buses...And then on to the embassy compound, where we were stored like thinning cattle. Grazing on concrete". This image of people treated as cattle is very similar to Eva's description of the crowded boxcar stuffed with people who were not even afforded an opportunity at decency in such conditions and set about like animals. Of course, the situations were different. Malka's story revolved around a relief effort, whereas Eva's trip was for death. Readers can also discern a likeness between Malka and Eva as two people in a strange, foreign place. When Eva goes to England to start her life over with the promise of a marriage, she is looked at as an oddity. She is completely out of place. Her world was a primitive sort of place in the concentration camp. Her life and those of the people around her was desperate and purely survival-based. The same was true of Malka, albeit more peaceful.

Each of the four subplots occur at different times, as mentioned earlier, and parallel one another. Although the stories have a different severity, they are very similar in attitude and function. The conclusion gained by these differing time periods are that prejudice and racism have not improved in hundreds of years and that the same problems still exist. The potential for the outrageous tragedy of the Holocaust and that of the Portobuffole Jews has not been eradicated as long as delicate situations like that of Othello and Malka exist. Humankind has not become enlightened, the main characters have only changed names and faces.

Admittedly, in a hasty reading of The Nature of Blood, the four major plots seem too unrelated and makes the book seem choppy and disjoint. However, with more patience and effort, the reader will begin to see that what first appeared to be choppy, is in actuality a fluid piece of work. The author is not just telling a story, he is relating a concept that really has no anchor to a specific place, time, or character. Prejudice is the real main character and the subplots are simply a definition of each aspect within the whole of prejudice and hate.

In an age like the present, in which even a minor event can sometimes be elevated to a "life-changing experience," one hesitates to say that one short book permanently changed someone's perception of the world, but it did for this reader. I was absolutely stunned by Caryl Philips's The Nature of Blood!

The book deals primarily with Eva, a 21-year-old concentration camp survivor and her life, thoughts, and memories. A second major story line involves Othello, hired by the Doge to lead the Venetian army against the Turks in the late 15th century, and his life and passionate love for Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian aristocrat. The two seemingly disparate stories are connected thematically, rather than narratively, as the book alternates from character to character and across time lines. Two other characters (Eva's uncle and an Ethiopian Jew who immigrates to Israel) have their space here, along with a 15th century trial of Jewish money-lenders in Venice, which connects obliquely with the Othello story.

The novel, which is not linear and does not follow a typical narrative pattern, is very impressionistic, more like a symphony than a traditional novel, with movements and complimentary themes playing in counterpoint to each other, The author experiments successfully with a variety of voices and points of view, switching back and forth through nearly 500 years of history and several pain-filled settings as he illustrates his themes. It is an intense and emotionally involving story of cultural, religious, and ethnic persecution, rivaling Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces in its impact. A truly remarkable achievement. Mary Whipple

Caryl Phillips' novel, The Nature of Blood, is an unusual read with its four major storylines shifting the readers focus around the globe and through time. The amazingly wonderful thing is how the author is able to adroitly pull all of these threads together to create a marvelous whole. The tales of prejudice tell a horrifyingly universal story but the individual characters within the stories speak of some hope amidst the anguish. It is a cleverly crafted work that turns history on its head in showing how times change but human emotions remain steadfastly consistent, both good and bad. A short, interesting, powerful read.

The Nature of Blood is an extraordinary novel that embeds individual stories within the larger history of racial politics in Europe. Stephen is a doctor and a militant living in Palestine just before the creation of the state of Israel. A doctor and an indoctrinator, he visits refuge camps where Jews wait to gain entrance into Palestine. The novel then leaps back in time to another camp, though this one more horrific: the concentration camp where young Eva barely lives, physically weak and emotionally numb. Here, she meets Gerry, one of the Americans who liberate the camp, and he becomes a small, tenuous lifeline. Eva's story forms the heart of the story, as we glimpse both happier times and the depth of the psychological toll her short life has taken. The novel then tumbles even further back in time, to 15th century Venice, where Jews live in walled ghettoes and can be accused of crimes based on rumor. Here, we meet Othello, who explores Venice as a new resident, acutely aware of his outsider status in Venetian society. Phillips briefly delves into other lives: Malka, an Ethiopian Jew who has traveled to Palestine, only to find that her skin color makes her unemployable; and Servadio, a Jewish banker unjustly accused of sacrificing a Christian boy.

These disparate stories are connected through centuries of European mistrust of outsiders, a wariness that periodically gives rise to bursts of hatred and cruelty. The betrayed can become the betrayers. While history gives these stories context, the characters give them power. Eva's unreliable narration evokes the brutality of the Holocaust as powerfully as the details themselves. Stephen's decision to return to Palestine has significance and poignancy, especially because we realize what happens to those he leaves behind. The historical aspect lends a sense of predestination as well - an inescapability - because the reader knows that Othello will become irrationally jealous and will kill both Desdemona and himself, that Eva's adolescence will be cruelly interrupted by the Nazis, that Palestine will become Israel, and that racism and the fear of the other will continue indefinitely throughout the future of humanity.

The Nature of Blood is not a long novel, but its impact is huge. I highly recommend it for readers of literary fiction who are likely to find the elegant prose as engaging as the stories themselves.

An incredible lyrical treatment of the history of the Jewish tribe. The story of a young woman, Eva Stern, fro Germany in the early 1930s, to the ghetto, the concentration camp, and final liberation. Without the usual accusing finger, yet bringing forth the shocking truths of utter human degradation. But the nature of Blood also deals with black Othello and white Desdemona, and a Jewish Ethiopian transplanted into Israel, the land yearned for and ending up disappointing. But the finale tells us that liberation does not set us free. We can not wipe out the past and understand the future: it is a foreign land to us and we do not fit.

A wonderful, but deeply disturbing book. It should be widely read.

This thoughtful, passionate and heady novel threads together stories of people separated by time and space but linked together in one way or another however tenuously.
What threads the different sagas together is the theme of the loneliness of the outsider struggling to find their way in an alien society.
The novel includes stories written from the viewpoint of a German Jewish girl who survives the horrors of the Holocaust and the British internment in Cyprus, where the British interned hundreds of thousands of Jews to prevent them returning to their ancient homeland, in order to appease Arab greed. Vivid descriptions of the horrors of the Holocaust and the shattered lives of the survivors.
After all this is it too much for the world to live with a tiny homeland (smaller than Wales) for the Jewish people where they can live in safety in peace, in a region where Arabs control 22 states?

It also focuses on her uncle, who sacrifices all to go to the then 'Palestine' to rebuild the Jewish homeland, and of an Ethiopian Jewish girl's life decades later as anew refugee in Israel.
The trial of the Jews of the Venice ghetto faced with persecution and prejudice and the horrific blood libels designed to frame them for persecution (relevant at a time when modern blood libels are today are used to justify hatred of Israel and the Jewish people today in order to prepare the world for another Holocaust).
Through his observations of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, the newly arrived Black Moorish general in Venice, Othello, is introduced to the saga-serving in a society both alien and hostile, and his romance with the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Venetian nobleman.

The concurrent theme is one of suffering, survival and renewal, the tragic repetitions of history, and the voices and emotions of the very real individuals caught up in the vast and cruel sweep of history.

In spare but eloquent prose, Mr. Phillips conveys the bleak pain of the "other." In tying different time points together in four distinct narratives he shows us how little difference there is in the treatment of minorities outside their own lands, whether they be Jews or people of color, or both.

By giving us the language of the oppressor he shows us the inherent falsity of their ideas, and consequently the justifiable bewilderment that human beings can be treated with such cruelty for no reason whatsoever.

A thoroughly heart-rending but totally convincing read.

I read this book for a general lit class first semester of last year and became entranced by it. This book is magnetic, it pulls you in and you are left to helplessly turn the pages while your eyes devour each carefully chosen word, which are strung together to make an unforgettable novel. I am a biochemistry major, but have a profound love of reading and writing. When I had to write a paper on this novel last year, i found the maximum of 10 pages stifling. There is just so much to this book, the literally angles and interwoven humanity through each masterfully-crafted tale contained within it, leaves one open to a vast sea of topics on which to write. I hope to one day teach a class which intertwines literature and science, this will certainly be a book on the list. Everyone should be exposed to the extreme humanity of this novel.

when i got this book, i didn't think i was going to be overwhelmed. sure, the premise was noble, but i expected it to be dry and preachy

boy was i wrong...

instead of telling you prejudice is wrong, caryl shows you in four plot lines, ecah worthy of their own novel. eva's story is the most compelling. we get to see the horror of the holocaust and how it shapes her life; even after eva is away from it, the nightmares continue. othello's story is interesting because we see the jews through his eyes as he tries to assmilate in venetian society, denying his identity in the process. you can also learn about the history of the jews and how they came to be a maligned people.

while none of the stories ever come together, they share a common thread : prejudice; how it affects the victims and the perpetrators. the parts of the novel which phillips graphically shows the holocaust horror took my breath away and made me angry that humans commited the crimes they did...

I read this twelve years ago and then came upon it on kindle. Amazing, beautiful book that tells some profound truths. The characters are real and the the fate of Eva and her sister remains long after you finish the book. One of the great undervalued books of the twentieth century.