Someone to Run With: A Novel - Hardcover

Grossman, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374266573 ISBN 13: 9780374266578

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

Synopsis

Earnest, awkward, and painfully shy, sixteen-year-old Assaf is having the worst summer of his life. With his big sister gone to America and his best friend suddenly the most popular kid in their class, Assaf worries away his days at a lowly summer job in Jerusalem city hall and spends his evenings alone, watching television and playing games on the Internet.

One morning, Assaf's routine is interrupted by an absurd assignment: to find the owner of a stray yellow lab. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, Tamar, a talented young singer with a lonely, tempestuous soul, undertakes an equally unpromising mission: to rescue a teenage drug addict from the Jerusalem underworld . . . and, eventually, to find her dog.

Someone to Run With is the most popular work to date from "a writer who has been, for nearly two decades, one of the most original and talented . . . anywhere" (The New York Times Book Review), a bestseller hailed by the Israeli press (and reform politicians such as Shimon Peres) for its mixture of fairy-tale magic, emotional sensitivity, and gritty realism. The novel explores the life of Israeli street kids-whom Grossman interviewed extensively for the novel-and the anxieties of family life in a society racked by self-doubt. Most of all, it evokes the adventure of adolescence and the discovery of love, as Tamar and Assaf, pushed beyond the limits of childhood by their quests, find themselves, and each other.

About this title

About the Author

David Grossman is the author of five novels as well as two groundbreaking worls of journalism, The Yellow Wind (1987) and Sleeping on a Wire (1993), several children's books, and a play. He lives in Jerusalem.

Reviews

Reading a novel in translation, it's been said, is like eating a boiled strawberry. Readers of Someone to Run With, the new novel by Israeli writer David Grossman, may well wonder: What on earth was this, before it hit the water? Grossman is widely known, and much respected, for his intricate novels of modern Israeli life. By contrast, Someone to Run With has a hook that seems tailor-made for a young adult readership: two Jerusalem teens on the run in that city's underworld, one looking to save her brother from drug addiction, the other to find the owner of a lost dog. They're an appealing duo -- trio, counting the dog -- and the novel's converging plotlines provide an atmosphere of romantic predestination that's no less engaging for being thoroughly predictable.

Yet the novel seems puzzlingly at odds with itself. Despite its YA storyline, it's a dense text, often ponderously descriptive, both in the presentation of its setting and in the degree of moment-to-moment psychological detail limning its characters. This makes for slow going, particularly in the novel's early chapters, where the chronology is elaborately scrambled.

Compounding these difficulties, crucial information is delayed so far into the tale that, for nearly half of its tightly packed 343 pages, the two characters' separate journeys through the city exist in narrative suspension. We know, for instance, that the girl Tamar, who has left her family for life on the streets, has stocked a cave in the countryside with food and other supplies. But we have no idea why. The effect is the same kind of false suspense favored by writers of popular crime and courtroom novels: As readers we're asked to remain engaged by events that everyone understands but us.

Grossman's novel has won a number of prestigious literary prizes, both in Israel and Europe, and in the book's defense, there's much to praise. At bottom, Grossman has written an urban adventure story, and he sets it in motion like a pro. As the novel begins, 16-year-old Assaf, a summer employee of the city's sanitation department whose parents have been called away to the United States, is charged with finding the owner of a lost dog.

As a narrative catalyst, a high-spirited Labrador retriever is hard to beat. Dragged pell-mell through the Jerusalem streets, Assaf lurches from one picaresque encounter to another, gradually assembling a portrait of the dog's missing owner, the troubled and mysterious Tamar, whom he becomes bent on rescuing.

Tamar, we learn, is on a mission of her own. She's left her home, disguised herself with a severe haircut, and taken up life as a street singer. A lot is hazy, but gradually the shape of her plan emerges: She hopes to attract the attention of a Fagan-like figure named Pesach, in the hope that he will lead her to her missing brother, a heroin-addicted musician.

Their twin quests -- Assaf's for Tamar, Tamar's for her brother -- offer a portrait of the teenage mind that's both refreshingly noble and convincingly observed. When Tamar finally infiltrates Pesach's organization and catches sight of the brother she hopes, against all odds, to save, she experiences a blast of self-confidence that perfectly captures the adolescent's largeness of feeling for the world: "Something new had happened to her: the unfamiliar winds of tranquility blew through her . . . . It would probably disappear in a minute -- but she would treasure it always, she would remember that place in her body where she felt it, where it was created, and would try to return there." At such moments, we can feel these two young people stepping into life.

This spell is broken, unfortunately, by a string of peculiarities within the text. In contrast to the subtle rendering of Grossman's adolescent characters, nearly all the adults in the book read like hastily sketched cartoons. This occurs most glaringly in the dialogue, especially in scenes of violent confrontation, when the translation assumes a weirdly lock-step literalness. A pair of street toughs threatens to "sexually abuse" Assaf and taunts him by asking "What's the matter, sister? We didn't drink our chocolate milk today? Mom ran out of Gerber food?" When Tamar narrowly escapes being caught making an illicit phone call from Pesach's office, his threats seem less menacing than badly dubbed: "You got lucky this time," he cautions. "It stinks to the sky, but you got lucky. Now open up your ears real good . . . one more time, if you so much as tickle the edge of my edge, you're finished." I couldn't help but think that in the next moment he would assume the preying mantis pose and say, "I must warn you, my Kung Fu is very good."

These idiomatic misfires -- and they're disconcertingly plentiful -- badly hamstring the novel, undercutting the seriousness of its themes with bursts of inadvertent hilarity. No less unconvincing is the book's denouement, a creaky deus ex machina.

I was left wondering who the novel was meant for. Adult readers with the patience to span the wide waters of its slower sections? Or teenagers, who would so closely identify with the main characters that they could pardon the book's hokier moments?

The answer is neither. Someone to Run With is best suited to one audience: readers of the original Hebrew.

Reviewed by Justin Cronin

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Very different from Grossman's books of political commentary, this entertaining novel is more like his Zigzag Kid (1997), part urban survival adventure, part YA romance, and part mystery. A best-seller in Israel and translated from the Hebrew in an informal, relaxed style, the story weaves together the lives of two middle-class teens who find themselves in Jerusalem's violent drug underworld. Tamar, a talented singer, runs away from home with her beloved dog, shaves her head, sets up a hideout. Who is she searching for? Why is she on the run? When she loses her dog, awkward, shy teenager Assaf finds the stray lab, who then leads him on a wild chase across the city until they find Tamar. The mob violence is too easily resolved, but the many plot surprises about "unconscious messengers" are fun, even when they are awkwardly contrived. For many readers, the most memorable character will be the lost dog, who always knows where he is going, who he is, and whom he loves. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Someone to Run With by David Grossman, translated by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz. Copyright © 2000 by David Grossman. Translation copyright © 2004 by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz. To be published in January, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.


A dog runs through the streets, a boy runs after it. A long rope connects the two and gets tangled in the legs of the passersby, who grumble and gripe, and the boy mutters "Sorry, sorry" again and again. In between mumbled sorries he yells "Stop! Halt!"—and to his shame a "Whoa-ah!" escapes from his lips. And the dog keeps running.

It flies on, crossing busy streets, running red lights. Its golden coat disappears before the boy's very eyes and reappears between people's legs, like a secret code. "Slower!" the boy yells, and thinks that if only he knew the dog's name, he could call it and perhaps the dog would stop, or at least slow down. But deep in his heart he knows the dog would keep running, even then. Even if the rope chokes its neck, it'll run until it gets where it's galloping to—and don't I wish we were already there and I was rid of him!

All this is happening at a bad time. Assaf, the boy, continues to run ahead while his thoughts remain tangled far behind him. He doesn't want to think them, he needs to concentrate completely on his race after the dog, but he feels them clanging behind him like tin cans. His parents' trip—that's one can. They're flying over the ocean right now, flying for the first time in their lives—why, why did they have to leave so suddenly, anyway? His older sister—there's another can—and he's simply afraid to think about that one, only trouble can come of it. More cans, little ones and big ones, are clanging, they bang against each other in his mind—and at the end of the string drags one that's been following him for two weeks now, and the tinny noise is driving him out of his mind, insisting, shrilly, that he has to fall madly in love with Dafi now—because how long are you going to try to put it off? And Assaf knows he has to stop for a minute, has to call these maddening tin followers to order, but the dog has other plans.

Assaf sighs—"Hell!"—because only a minute before the door opened and he was called in to see the dog, he was so close to identifying the part of himself in which he could fall in love with her, with Dafi. He could actually, finally, feel that spot in himself; he could feel himself suppressing it, refusing it in the depths of his stomach, where a slow, silent voice kept whispering. She's not for you, Dafi, she spends all her time looking for ways to sting and mock everyone, especially you: why do you need to keep up this stupid show, night after night? Then, when he had almost succeeded in silencing that quarrelsome voice, the door of the room in which he had been sitting every day for the last week, from eight to four, opened. There stood Avraham Danokh, skinny and dark and bitter, the assistant manager of the City Sanitation Department. (He was sort of a friend of his father's and got Assaf the job for August.) Danokh told him to get off his ass and come down to the kennels with him, now, because there was finally work for him to do.

Danokh paced the room and started explaining something about a dog. Assaf didn't listen. It usually took him a few seconds to transfer his attention from one situation to another. Now he was dragging after Danokh along the corridors of City Hall, past people who came to pay their bills or their taxes or snitch on the neighbors who built a porch without a license. Following Danokh down the fire stairs, then into the courtyard in back, he tried to decide whether he had already managed to defeat his own last stand against Dafi, whether he knew yet how he would respond today when Roi told him to quit stalling and start acting like a man. Already, in the distance, Assaf heard one strong, persistent bark and wondered why it sounded like that: usually the dogs all barked together—sometimes their chorus would disturb his daydreams on the third floor—and now only one was barking. Danokh opened a chain-link gate and, turning to tell Assaf something he couldn't make out over the barks, opened the other gate, and, with a flick of his hand, motioned Assaf down the narrow walkway between the cages.

The sound was unmistakable. It was impossible to think that Danokh had brought Assaf down here for just one dog; eight or nine were penned in separate cages. But only one dog was animated; it was as if it had absorbed the others into its own body, leaving them silent and a bit stunned. The dog wasn't very big, but it was full of strength and savagery and, mainly, despair. Assaf had never seen such despair in a dog; it threw itself against the chain links of its cage again and again, making the entire row shake and rattle—then it would produce a horrifying high wail, a strange cross between a whine and a roar. The other dogs stood, or lay down, watching in silence, in amazement, even respect. Assaf had the strange feeling that if he ever saw a human being behave that way, he would feel compelled to rush up and offer his help—or else leave, so the person could be alone with his sorrow.

In the pauses between barks and slams against the cage, Danokh spoke quietly and quickly: one of the inspectors had found the dog the day before yesterday, running through the center of town near Tziyyon Square. At first the vet thought it was in the early stage of rabies, but there were no further signs of disease: apart from the dirt and a few minor injuries, the dog was in perfect health. Assaf noticed that Danokh spoke out of the corner of his mouth, as if he were trying to keep the dog from knowing it was being talked about. "He's been like that for forty-eight hours now," Danokh whispered, "and still not out of batteries. Some animal, huh?" he added, stretching nervously as the dog stared at him. "It's not just a street dog." "But whose is it?" Assaf asked, stepping back as the dog threw itself against the metal mesh, rocking the cage. "That's it, exactly," Danokh responded nasally, scratching his head, "that's what you have to find out." "Me? How me?" Assaf quavered. "Where will I find him?" Danokh said that as soon as this kalb—he called it a kalb, using Arabic—calms down a little, we'll ask him. Assaf looked at him, puzzled, and Danokh said, "We'll simply do what we always do in such cases: we tie a rope to the dog and let it walk for a while, an hour or two, and it will lead you itself, straight and steady, to its owner."

Assaf thought he was joking—who had ever heard of such a thing? But Danokh took a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and said it was very important, before he gave the dog back, for the owners to sign the form. Form 76. Put it in your pocket—and don't lose it (because, to tell the truth, you seem a little out to lunch). And most important, you have to explain to the esteemed master of this dog that a fine is included. A settlement of one hundred and fifty shekels or a trial—and he'd better pay up. First of all, he neglected to watch his dog, and maybe that will teach him a lesson to be more careful next time, and second, as a minimal compensation (Danokh enjoyed sucking, mockingly, on every syllable) for the headache and hassle he had caused City Hall, not to mention the waste of time of such superb human resources! With that, he tapped Assaf on the shoulder a little too hard and said that after he found the dog's owners, he could return to his room in the Water Department and continue to scratch his head at the taxpayers' expense until the end of his summer vacation.

"But how am I . . ." Assaf objected. "Look at it . . . It's like, crazy . . . "

But then it happened: the dog heard Assaf's voice and stood still. It stopped running back and forth in the cage, approached the wire mesh, and looked at Assaf. Its ribs were still heaving, but it moved more slowly. Its eyes were dark and seemed to focus intensely on him. It cocked its head to the side, as if to get a better look at him, and Assaf thought that the dog was about to open its mouth right then and say in a completely human voice, Oh yeah? You're not exactly a model of sanity yourself.

It lay on its stomach, the dog; it lowered its head, and its front legs slipped under the metal grid, begging with a digging motion, and out of its throat a new voice emerged, thin and delicate like the cry of a puppy, or a little boy.

Assaf bent in front of it, from the other side of the cage. He didn't notice what he was doing—even Danokh, a hard man, who had arranged the job for Assaf without much enthusiasm, smiled a thin smile when he saw the way Assaf got down on his knees at the blink of an eye. Assaf looked at the dog and spoke quietly to it. "Who do you belong to?" he asked. "What happened to you? Why are you going so crazy?" He spoke slowly, leaving room for answers, not embarrassing the dog by looking into its eyes for too long. He knew—his sister Reli's boyfriend had taught him—the difference between talking at a dog and talking with a dog. The dog was breathing fast, lying down. Now, for the first time, it seemed tired, exhausted, and it looked a lot smaller than before. The kennels finally fell silent, and the other dogs began moving again, as if coming back to life. Assaf put his finger through one of the holes and touched the dog's head. It didn't move. Assaf scratched its head, the matted, dirty fur. The dog began to whine, frightened, persistent, as if it had to unburden itself to someone right away, as if it could no longer keep silent. Its red tongue trembled. Its eyes grew large and expressive.

Assaf didn't argue with Danokh after that. Danokh took advantage of the dog's momentary calm: he entered the cage and tied a long rope to the orange collar hidden in its thick fur.

"Go on, take it," Danokh ordered. "Now it'll go with you like a doll." Danokh jumped b...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374266573
• ISBN 13: 9780374266578
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352