Such an unassuming title—see under: love. Makes me think of something intimate and tender for the Hallmark Channel—you know, poignant. I’d seen it in bookstores for years and had never been the least bit tempted. Then I read about its author, David Grossman, in an excellent New Yorker profile by George Packer—Grossman is Israeli, and plays a somewhat prominent part in leftist politics. According to Packer, see under: love had something to do with the holocaust and was the book that had made Grossman’s reputation in the late 1980s. So I decided to read it.
It was not poignant. It was a tornado—a little bit Kafka, a little bit Ulysses (Nighttown), a little bit … I don’t know what. I saw the word phantasmagoric used somewhere to describe it, and that hits the mark. I had about as much chance to comprehend the finer points of this book as George Bush had of comprehending the effects of Katrina as he flew over in his helicopter. I didn’t so much read see under: love as perform a reconnaisance. It’s a beast.
The book is divided into four sections, each so different that it could almost be its own book. The first part concerns Momek, a young boy growing up in Israel in 1959. He lives among a cast of older relatives who have barely managed to survive the holocaust. Most of them are damaged, some have lost their minds completely, like his great uncle Anshel Wasserman, who arrives in an ambulance one day. We see the world through Momek’s eyes as he tries to make sense of the human wreckage around him. He hears something about a “Nazi beast,” but, without having any hard information to go on, tries to figure out what this beast is and how to make it show itself. He goes so far as to imprison cats, birds, and mice in his basement with the notion that he can make the mysterious beast manifest itself from one of these animals.
In the later sections Momek has grown up to be Schlomo and is the author or at least the consciousness through whom the story passes. The second section is the phantasmagoric one. It has to do with Bruno Schultz, who was an interesting real-life writer and artist who had the misfortune to be Jewish in Poland in the early 1940s. He dies in a rather unusual way—here is how the event was described in the Grossman New Yorker profile:
…After a Jewish dentist in town was murdered by a German officer who had acted as Schulz’s protector, a German who had been the dentist’s protector shot Schulz, saying, “You killed my Jew—I killed yours.”
But in section 2 of see under: love, Shultz experiences an alternate reality—he escapes to Danzig, jumps into the Baltic and becomes a salmon. But that description is like the description of a dream—it grabs the most coherent detail but loses about 99.9% of the essence of the writing.
Most of the writers who incorporate fantastic or hallucinogenic elements into their work keep one foot in reality—Kafka, for example, is compelling in part because his characters are very orderly and earthbound, anxious to remain on the straight and narrow paths of their quotidian lives, even though they contend with dreamlike circumstances. In see under: love there is no such anchor in reality. You put the tab under your tongue and settle in:
Meanwhile, on the other side of the square, next to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz, happier events were in progress: Edzio, the young cripple, swinging his muscular torso on crutches, finally met Adela face to face. Stout Edzio, whose cruel parents took his crutches away at night, and who dragged himself like a dog every night to Adela’s window, to press his deformed face against the pane, and watch the lovely servant girl in deep slumber, sprawling naked and moist for columns of bedbugs, wandering through the wilderness of sleep… He saw her, and she, without opening her eyes, saw him. And a small spark passed between them, with a trembling that shook the people all around. And they stood and stared at each other, and for a moment Adela’s eyes were opened: a thin white film—like the film over a parrot’s eye—was lifted, and light flashed, like a magnesium bulb. She saw his soul, understood the full force of his tragedy. She read the story of his nightly vigil over her dreams and felt the column of bedbugs turn to fingers of desire between her thighs. She contracted with pain and pleasure, and let him kiss her, in his thoughts, for the first time.
Those bedbugs—it’s like something out of Buñuel, or Dali. Edzio and Adela are in the book for about three pages and never appear again.
The third section describes the relationship between a Jewish children’s book author and a Nazi death camp commandant in 1943. (No turning back now…) The children’s book author is none other than Momek’s gibbering great uncle from the first section—Anshel Wasserman. We are given to understand that Momek—Schlomo—is inventing this history for his great uncle, and so we can tolerate a certain amount of … implausibility in the story. The commandant, Neigel, grew up reading Wasserman’s celebrated tales for children, known as The Children of the Heart.
Although there is still much to marvel at in the third section, my enthusiasm did begin to flag. The story is relentlessly extravagant and inventive, but is becoming a bit overwrought. It is not dramatically feasible to maintain such a high emotional pitch. Invention becomes tiresome when new characters and scenes keep emerging—really there are entire new books and universes erupting into the storyline. Section four is in the form of an encyclopedia; it deals primarily with characters and events imagined by Neigel and Wasserman. The Children of the Heart live in a zoo in Warsaw. They have various mystical and magical talents. There are dozens of them. Every few minutes, I count how many pages I have left to read. I long to be done with see under: love.