From FP:
"The Israeli writer David Grossman's new novel To the End of the Land, which was published in the United States this week, has generated the kind of buzz that publicists dream about. Paul Auster likened Grossman to Flaubert and Tolstoy and declared the book a work of "overwhelming power and intensity." Novelist Nicole Krauss was even more emphatic. In a long blurb, she gushed, "Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same.... To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude."
It's easy to snicker at the breathlessness of such praise (and many did), but it testifies to the reverence with which Grossman is regarded in liberal circles in America and Europe. Though much of his recent fiction (most of which has been translated from Hebrew into English and published widely abroad) deals with quotidian topics like marriage and adultery, drugs, love, and life as a teenager, Grossman is known -- and venerated -- outside of Israel primarily for his critiques of Israeli policy. Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg, writing recently in Newsweek, characteristically described Grossman (and his fellow novelist Amos Oz) as Israel's "national consciences." In June, Grossman won the prestigious German Book Trade Peace Prize for his efforts as an "active supporter of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis."
This week, Grossman is the subject of a long, laudatory essay in the New Yorker by George Packer. The article, along with the publication of To the End of the Land, the story of a woman wandering across Israel to escape the possible news of her son's death in combat, completed after Grossman's own son Uri died in Lebanon in 2006, will likely only add to the Grossman mystique in America. And as fragile peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians threaten to collapse, Americans are looking to Grossman for a distillation of the Middle Eastern moment."
"The Israeli writer David Grossman's new novel To the End of the Land, which was published in the United States this week, has generated the kind of buzz that publicists dream about. Paul Auster likened Grossman to Flaubert and Tolstoy and declared the book a work of "overwhelming power and intensity." Novelist Nicole Krauss was even more emphatic. In a long blurb, she gushed, "Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same.... To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude."
It's easy to snicker at the breathlessness of such praise (and many did), but it testifies to the reverence with which Grossman is regarded in liberal circles in America and Europe. Though much of his recent fiction (most of which has been translated from Hebrew into English and published widely abroad) deals with quotidian topics like marriage and adultery, drugs, love, and life as a teenager, Grossman is known -- and venerated -- outside of Israel primarily for his critiques of Israeli policy. Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg, writing recently in Newsweek, characteristically described Grossman (and his fellow novelist Amos Oz) as Israel's "national consciences." In June, Grossman won the prestigious German Book Trade Peace Prize for his efforts as an "active supporter of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis."
This week, Grossman is the subject of a long, laudatory essay in the New Yorker by George Packer. The article, along with the publication of To the End of the Land, the story of a woman wandering across Israel to escape the possible news of her son's death in combat, completed after Grossman's own son Uri died in Lebanon in 2006, will likely only add to the Grossman mystique in America. And as fragile peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians threaten to collapse, Americans are looking to Grossman for a distillation of the Middle Eastern moment."
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