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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Skibell, J. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
This book presents Heidegger as a thinker of revolution. Understanding revolution as an occurrence whereby the previously unforeseeable comes to appear as inevitable, the temporal character of such an event is explored through Heidegger's discussion of temporality and historicity. Beginning with his magnum opus,Being and Time,Heidegger is shown to have undertaken a radical rethinking of time in terms of human action, understood as involving both doing and making and as implicated in an interplay of the opportune moment (kairos) and temporal continuity (chronos). Developing this theme through his key writings of the early 1930s, the book shows how Heidegger's analyses of truth and freedom led to an increasingly dialectical account of time and action culminating in his phenomenology of the - artistic and political - 'work'. A context is thus given for Heidegger's political engagement in 1933. While diagnosing the moral failure of this engagement, the book defends Heidegger's account of the time of human action and shows it to foreshadow his later thought of a 'new beginning'.
Author Notes
Felix Ó Murchadha is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A major talent is revealed in this debut novel, a work that combines the hallucinatory quality of D.M Thomas's The White Hotel, the enigma of a Talmudic fable, the charm of a Yiddish folk tale and the lyric surrealism of a Chagall painting. When elderly Chaim Skibelski climbs out of a mass grave in which the bodies of all the Jewish inhabitants of a Polish village have been thrown by German soldiers, at first he does not understand that he is dead. Lightly, with a sense of wonderment rather than anger, he narrates his return to his own home, where a Polish family are already ensconced, and his discovery that the rebbe has been reincarnated as a crow. The only person who can see Chaim is the terminally ill daughter of the Polish family; Chaim cares for her tenderly, and when she dies, Jesus and Mary bring her to heaven. Eventually, the rebbe opens the mass grave and the dead Jewstheir mutilated, decomposing bodies filled with maggots and corroded by lime (the stark realism of their stench coexists with the surreal fantasy of the scene)follow Chaim and the rebbe through the forest. They come to an opulent hotel where they are welcomed, given beautiful clothes and fine meals. Chaim is reunited with his (dead) wife, children and grandchildren, a bittersweet moment because he realizes that only two members of his family, his sons in America, have escaped the Holocaust. Then, in a stunning scene bristling with irony, the Final Solution is again reenacted. During all this time, the moon has been absent from the sky; the Poles maintain that "the Yids took it," and, indeed, two Hasids have inadvertently pulled the shining orb from the heavens. In the final act of healing with which this novel ends, the traditional Hebrew blessing on the moon brings a kind of closure to the horror. Skibell's masterful skill in maintaining the thin line between fantasy and reality and between sorrow and bitterness, his deft interjection of gallows humor and poetic passages of gossamer delicacy, allows him to spin a story that beguiles even as it breaks your heart. BOMC selection; rights sold in Germany and the U.K.; author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An unusual first novel, about the fate of the Polish Jews during WW II, that engagingly blends doctrinal wisdom with magical- realist surrealism. The protagonist and narrator, 60-year-old Chaim Skibelski (identified as the author's great-grandfather) is, as his remarkable story begins, dead--shot by German soldiers and dumped into a mass grave along with dozens of his kinsmen and townspeople. Yet Chaim's torn and still-bleeding body remains above ground, invisible to others, paradoxically capable of thinking and feeling, getting drunk, committing poltergeist-like mischief, and conversing with wolves, among other newfound abilities. On his continually interrupted pilgrimage toward ``the World to Come,'' Chaim is accompanied (then, unaccountably, deserted) by his village rabbi, whose shape has shifted into that of a talking crow; reunites with his two wives, several children, and various old friends; debates (in the most awkward and over-attenuated sequence here) man's obligation to his fellow man with the decapitated head of a German soldier; and crosses a river to arrive at the luxurious Hotel Amfortas--which appears to be a beneficent purgatory, until Chaim discovers what is actually being baked in the hotel's underground ovens. Finally, he joins a group of scholars who have hidden out during the war and are employing mathematics, astrophysics, and the precepts of the Kabbalah in an effort to restore to its empty place in the sky the disappeared, ``landlocked'' moon. Their labor is accomplished, and in a lovely visionary conclusion, Chaim's abused and weary body is laid to rest. This is, on balance, a haunting novel, intensely imagined, and--if less successfully plotted and placed--redeemed by Skibell's gifts for vivid imagery (sleeping ``bodies lie twisted, like shipwrecks, in the sheets, as though a great sea had tossed them there'') and robust gallows humor (``If there is a Paradise, do you actually think they'd let Jews into it?''). A fine debut, manifestly infused with deep familial and cultural feeling, and a significant contribution to the ongoing literature of the Holocaust.
Booklist Review
Magical realism in the gas chambers? How else to express the unimaginable cosmic horror that exploded the daily life of millions? Chaim Skibelski climbs out of the pit where he and his Mintz community were shot to death and returns as a ghost to his home, which has been taken over by a Polish family. Then he lives and dies through every kind of Holocaust experience. He leads his squabbling, kvetching community of corpses on a march of blood through the snow until they come to a river and are seduced into crossing it and entering a luxurious hotel, where they are burned in the ovens. Chaim escapes. The narrative gets heavy-handed when the metaphors are worked out with minutiae of Jewish mysticism. What does work is the way the great moral questions rise right out of the wild drama of ordinary people, as when the severed head of the German who shot Chaim asks for kindness, or when Chaim's friend asks, Why did you leave me behind when you climbed out of the pit? --Hazel Rochman
Library Journal Review
Chaim Skibelski climbs out of a mass grave containing 3000 residents of his Polish village who were slaughtered along with him. Shortly after realizing he's dead, he rouses the decayed ghosts of his neighbors and, in search of the "World to Come," the grisly parade wanders through the forest to a luxury hotel, where the horrors of the Holocaust are reenacted. Actor Allen Rickman brilliantly narrates Skibell's debut novel, a macabre tale first published in 1997 to rave reviews and newly available on audio. His tone of determined cheerfulness creates the mood of a Yiddish folktale. An unconventional but interesting addition to Holocaust literature collections that will appeal to listeners who enjoy magic realism. [This audio edition was a Wyatt's World "Best Bets" selection, LJ Xpress 11/8/10; the Berkley Trade pb was described as leaving "a lasting impression," LJ 9/1/97.-Ed.]-Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.