Falling Out of Time - Hardcover

David Grossman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385350139 ISBN 13: 9780385350136

Publisher: Knopf, 2014

Synopsis

Following his magisterial To the End of the Land, the universally acclaimed Israeli author brings us an incandescent fable of parental grief––concise, elemental, a powerfully distilled experience of understanding and acceptance, and of art’s triumph over death.
 
In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama––part play, part prose, pure poetry––to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son. The man––called simply Walking Man––paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net-Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Math Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman’s answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death’s hermetic separateness. For the reader, the solace is in their clamorous vitality, and in the gift of Grossman’s storytelling––a realm where loss is not merely an absence but a life force of its own.

About this title

About the Author

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem, where he still lives. He is the best-selling author of many works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, which have been translated into thirty-six languages. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the French Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome’s Premio per la Pace e l’Azione Umanitaria, the Premio Ischia International Award for Journalism, Israel’s Emet Prize, and the 2010 Frankfurt Peace Prize.

Reviews

*Starred Review* With a strange and wonderful tale, Grossman challenges the boundaries separating life from death, sanity from madness. Announcing I have to go, a grief-stricken Israeli villager takes leave of his bewildered wife, embarking on a journey to there—an impossibly undefined place where he hopes to find and to speak with his dead son. As he sets out walking, in ever-widening circles around his village, the Walking Man becomes a Pied Piper of Bereavement, drawing behind him the Midwife, the Net-Mender, the Elderly Math Teacher, the Duke—all staggering under loads of sadness due to the loss of a loved one. Even the Town Chronicler—who narrates the bizarre quest—joins his distraught wife in the company following the Walking Man into a dreamscape where the deepest fears stirred by death collide with the most passionate hopes for life. Together these grim marchers unfold a dark colloquy—by turns heartrending and comforting—on what it means to love the departed, what it means to accept—or defy—death. Intensifying the pathos, deepening the soul-searching, husbands and wives repeatedly struggle to preserve their union despite sharply contrasting ways of dealing with their shared loss. A potent fusion of poetry, fiction, and drama sweeps readers into very deep waters! --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385350139
• ISBN 13: 9780385350136
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208