Disclosure: I was sent a promo copy of D.O. Dodd's new novel 'Jew'. I probably wouldn't have read it otherwise, but I'm really glad that I was 'compelled' to do so.
The blurb gives a reasonable flavour of the book:
A MAN REGAINS consciousness to find himself naked in a mass grave, with no idea who he is. His thought is survival, but in a religious war survival depends on knowing which side you are on.
Donning another man’s military uniform, he drives off and enters a nearby town to discover that the occupying soldiers have been waiting for someone very much like him.
Suddenly, he finds himself in power.
His first act is to save a woman about to be murdered by soldiers. The woman, as it turns out, has a history with the man, and knows more of him than he knows of himself, or does she actually have the right man?
If that sounds mysterious, even Kafkaesque (a cliche, but quite an accurate one in this case), that's because the book is mysterious and Kafkaesque. It's also extremely disturbing, not just because of the explicit violence (some of it sexual) that permeates the book, but also because of a strange, indefinable, unsettling feeling that leaves the reader (like the book's central character) adrift in a world where nothing is clear.
Jew's holocaust resonances are clear - mass graves, genocide, an occupying army - but as the book progresses the reader is increasingly wrong-footed as the actual specific historical and geographical location becomes less and less clear. At times the victims in the book appear to be Jews, but then occasional Arabic words imply a more contemporary - and for many Jews, much more unsettling - context. At the same time, many of the details seem to correspond with no 'real' war or genocide.
We are left then with a text that disturbs, that shakes the readers complacency. I put down the book (which is pretty short and I read in the course of an afternoon) knowing little more than when I started. I'm not sure that Jew is a satisfying book and it's certainly not an enjoyable one, but it's worth the attention of anyone who takes pleasure in enigmatic literature.
I picked up 'Jew' in Oxford railway station's WH Smith this afternoon, thought to begin reading it in the 1/3 hr we had to wait for our train back to London, then work on the train - I couldn't put it down.
Then waiting in the car this evening I caught 15 mins of tonights episode of Vasilly Grossman from the Front Line on Radio 4 - and felt I was in the same place!! It's not available on Listen Again yet - but do listen when it is (soon and for the next week): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014ptrt
Posted by: Ruth Warrens | September 18, 2011 at 08:48 PM