The Name

by Michal Govrin

Book Overview

The recipient of two of Israel's most prestigious literary awards, The Name tells the story of Amalia, a daughter of Holocaust survivors who seeks desperately to remake her life and escape her... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573220728
• ISBN13: 9781573220729
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 375 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

An important book of prayer, a meditation, sacred recital

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.

A book that stirs your mind and body

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.