Customer Reviews

The Retreat: A novel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Marginal Jewish characters who would do without their own Jewish identity gather together at a ' retreat' where they are to develop traits which will free them of their 'undesirable' Jewish traits. The major character, an actress who has been forced into retirement, and who has an uneasy relationship with her daughter comes to the Retreat and like its other inhabitants is enclosed and imprisoned by it. Appelfeld is a master of depicting such marginal characters, who seem somehow unreal and threatened not only by the hostile world outside but by their own lack of substance. On the edge of the great destruction of the Jewish people these characters seem half- dead and in some way longing for their own destruction.

Though I sense the art, the depth, the cunning of the master writer at work here I nonetheless found the reading difficult and claustrophobic.

Appelfeld is a writer of immense critical reputation, and truly a writer of unique perception, experience and sensibility.

He is truly a unique and troubling voice, the remembrance and the promise of a terrible disaster that has already happened, and is told as if it is about to come.

I read this book in a day- very short and very vague. This is the first I've read of this author so I don't know if this is his style or a different feel than his other books. It is basically filled with characters that hate their Jewishness. However, these characters are one dimensional, boring sketches that failed to interest me. I kept trying to ponder this book after finishing for some worthy or powerful statement of Anything! All I discovered is that I'm GLAD some books are really short.