Review by New York Times Review
ELIE WIESEL has become so well-known a crusader against hatred, violence and persecution that one can forget he has also been, from the beginning, a writer. Wiesel has said his primary vocation assumed a secondary role by accident. Contrary to what his schedule - addresses before the United Nations, dinners with presidents - might suggest, he insists he is at heart an introvert who, if the world assented, would choose private reflection over public activism. While Wiesel is best known for his memoir "Night," he is also a novelist. Much of his fiction, however, is essentially allegorical, a vessel for the contemplation of eternal questions. Wiesel's latest novel, "A Mad Desire to Dance," continues this pattern. Although austerely written and at times thought-provoking, it treads familiar ground. The protagonist, Doriel Waldman, is a Jewish New Yorker in his early 60s who believes he has gone mad. Born in Poland just before World War II, Doriel hid with his father, sister and brother while his mother, blond and the holder of a counterfeit Aryan identity card, fought for the resistance. Unlike his siblings, who were captured and killed, Doriel survived the war, as did his parents, though they died in a car crash soon after the liberation of the concentration camps. An aunt and uncle raised Doriel in America, but he demands to be called an orphan and never allows himself to be loved. "As far as I can read people's gazes," Doriel explains, "they see me as mad. And I've always felt I was. Mad about my parents first, then about God, study, truth, beauty and impossible love." Deeply troubled ("Why," he asks, "when I shut my eyes, do I always have the feeling of being in hostile territory?") but too lucid to be labeled insane, Doriel seeks relief from a psychotherapist, Thérèse Goldschmidt. Yet his doctor has her own difficulties in dealing with the Nazis' legacy: both she and her husband are the children of Holocaust survivors who refuse to speak of their experiences, and neither has "uttered the word under our roof." As Doriel meets with Dr. Goldschmidt, we learn that he suffers from intense anxiety, repressed sexual desires and, above all, unrelenting guilt: for surviving Hitler's war, for his inability to give and receive love, for doubting God. Also, he adds, "I felt oddly guilty for not feeling guilty enough." Despite its thematic possibilities, Wiesel's narrative turns out to be uncomfortably simplistic. Doriel may be a difficult patient, and in the course of treating him Dr. Goldschmidt may question her professional abilities, but enlightenment for both is just a few heart-rending sessions away. These stilted therapy scenes read as if Wiesel wrote them with a textbook at his side. ("Transference," we are told at one point, "is a common occurrence in analysis: the patient becomes enamored of the analyst.") Wiesel has long been concerned with fundamental questions of good and evil, and Doriel sprinkles his discussions of the past with references to the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and Hasidic teachings, as well as observations on Zionism and Eastern asceticism. This gives the writing an aphoristic quality. In one of his therapy sessions, for example, Doriel recalls a man he met on a trip to Jerusalem who asked, "Do you know why God demands that each of us love Him?" and then quickly answered his own question: "He doesn't need our love, but we need it." Elsewhere Doriel tells Dr. Goldschmidt that "The Book of Job taught me that the sadness of one group of people doesn't alleviate the sadness of others. On the contrary: it adds to it." Such facile insights add little to Elie Wiesel's legacy. But perhaps they're beside the point. In "One Generation After," a collection of essays and stories published in 1970, Wiesel declared that he attaches "more importance to questions than to answers. For only the questions can be shared." When there are no answers, the writing must go on. Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Wiesel continues to write Holocaust fiction and nonfiction, but nothing has the enduring power of his stark memoir Night (1960) about his experience in the camps, where he watched his father break down and die. In this novel, translated from the French, it is once again a survivor's memories of what happened to a boy and his family that will rivet readers. At 60, Doriel Waldman, a religious scholar single, insomniac, alone speaks to a psychoanalyst in New York, remembering his childhood hiding in a Polish village, trying to deal with his guilt. At times, the drama almost drowns in commentary and contemplation ( Am I mad? What is madness? Who will tell me who I am? ). We even get excerpts from the psychologist's notes as the patient ruminates about his melancholy and why he is unable to commit to a relationship. Beyond the therapy and philosophy, the terse personal vignettes are gripping: from how Doriel's sister sacrificed herself for him, to his return home after the war to find villagers occupying his house. The secrets surprise you to the end.--Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nobel laureate Wiesel (Night) grapples with questions of madness, sadness and memory in this difficult but powerful novel. Doriel Waldman, a Polish Jew born in 1936, survived the occupation in hiding with his father while his mother made a reputation for herself in the Polish resistance. But he did not escape tragedy: his two siblings were murdered and his parents died in an accident shortly after the war. At the novel's opening, he is 60 years old, miserable, alone and on the verge of insanity. Most of the novel unfolds in the office of Doriel's shrink, Dr. Therese Goldschmidt, where he reveals himself to be an uncooperative patient, and his aggressive, obsessive rants on the origins of his troubles make for difficult reading. But Wiesel handles the situation expertly, and as Therese draws Doriel out, a multilayered narrative emerges: the journey through sadness and toward redemption; a meditation on the hand dealt to Holocaust survivors; and a valuable parable on the wages of human trauma. While the novel is not always easy sledding, there are ample rewards--intellectual and visceral--for the willing reader. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Doriel Waldman, a reclusive and scholarly European Jew living in New York City, has tried to block out the nightmarish events of the 20th century by retreating into the world of medieval Jewish history. He is a student of Jewish traditions and the Jewish community, but he is incapable of forming relationships. Now, at age 60, he is so lonely and depressed that he fears his soul has been stolen by a dybbuk. In desperation, he decides to try traditional psychoanalysis but proves to be an extremely difficult patient, arguing with his female therapist every step of the way, just as he has argued with God. He is especially reluctant to discuss his parents, who died in a car crash just after World War II. The therapy novel is a distinct genre, and Wiesel takes full advantage of the format by gradually revealing the important traumas in Doriel's life and illuminating them with extracts from the therapist's notebooks. Originally published in France, this dense and difficult novel expands on some of the provocative themes in Nobel Prize winner Wiesel's celebrated memoir, Night. For larger fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/08.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Interactions between a patient and his therapist elucidate the human condition in the latest from Nobel Prize winner Wiesel (The Time of the Uprooted, 2005, etc.). "Is a madman who knows he's mad really mad?" the narrator imagines the reader asking on the first page of the novel. "Or: In a mad world, isn't the madman who is aware of his madness the only sane person?" The novel's self-absorbed protagonist, Doriel Waldman, might not be mad at all, though he could well be delusional, is obviously troubled and is very much alone. He's also uncommonly bright and perceptive, a challenge for his female therapist, whose notes on her sessions with Doriel comprise much of the novel that isn't his narration. During the course of their therapy sessions, she learns of his life with his parents in Brooklynhis mother, who could pass as Aryan and served in the undercover Resistance, and his father, whose features were more recognizably Jewish. Both of them died in an automobile accident after the war, and both of his siblings are dead as well. The orphaned Doriel came to live in Brooklyn with relatives, failing to fill the hole left by the deaths in his family with a series of encounters with girls and women, who may or may not be imaginary. His doctor knows he is independently wealthy, but not why, and she suspects that he may be a virgin, though he is somewhere around 60 years old. With most of the novel transpiring in Doriel's memory and in his sessions, he seems less like a madman than an existential Everyman, one for whom "being born is more like exile than liberation." He finds himself in a state of perpetual fear, "a fear that is not yet death but that is no longer life." Yet the novel ultimately ends on an affirmative note, a triumph of life's dance of desire over the madness that is a living death. Philosophy meets psychology in this profound, often poetic novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
