Wednesday, September 16, 1992 —- North Shore News - 29 Capturing the sacred in secular life Twilight and Other Stories, by Skulamith Hareven, Mercury House/Raincoast Books, 156 pp., $13.95 paper ; Barbara Black ‘BOOK REVIEW SR HE TITLE story of this ; collection, Twilight, describes a claustrophobic, Kafka-like nightmare in which a weman lives ina city with no light, ina state of op- : pression,.in both her civic -and personal lives. ’ Floating through a joyless ex- - istence, entombed in the in- evitability of human passages of life, the narrator marries a stranger she meets at the opera and gives - - - birth to a child who ‘‘stood up and walked within a day or two ... ~ one day he left and did not “weturn.”* This life is a sort of brutal parallel universe to her own fife, to which she returns at the end of the story. . At home in “reality” she hears ~~ her children's and. husband’s - voices but can’t understand them “as though they were a transla- - tion that had not come off well: | ay still, waiting for my sou! to flow Jane Austen Society meets f “FINE DANCING,:1 believe, like virtue,”’ wrote Jane’ Austen in her 1816) novel, Emma, ‘must be its ‘own. reward.” _. Im honor of the British author's ::xlove of dance, Delta dance histo- tian Catherine.Lee will be teaching the virtues of quadrilles. and - cotiflions at a special meeting of the Jane Austen Society this Satur- ‘day at St. Philips Fireside Room in Vancouver. full in me again.” Hareven’s book is a translation that does come off well. In Twilight and Other Stories, she seems to have distilled the souls of the inhabitants of Jerusalem of whom she writes. Perhaps it is the beauty of the Hebrew (the only language in which Hareven will write) that comes through even in the transla- tion (by various translators). The stories capture the holiness that permeates secular life. Although the back cover likens it to Joyce" s Dubliners, the com- parison falls short. Twilight is more brooding, with a twist of the sur- real, flavored by a wry sense of humor. With a flair for storytelling more akin to Isaac Bashevis Singer. than Joyce, Hareven exposes people’ s quirks and frailties with amusing ~ turns of phrase: “The violinist Tiberius Kovacs is a gigantic, black, bespectacled heron whose gothic movements send arches of stained glass flying high in all di- rections.” Characters are either endearing- ly stubborn, morose, senile or coraplacent (in a characteristically Jewish way), or they teeter on the . verge of illumination: “There was an opaqueness in her that she fail- ed to comprehend...’ The Rules of Partial Existence, by judy Millar, ked Deer Col- lege Press/Raincoast Sooks, 191 pp., $12.95 paper While Hareven’s writing main- tains its integrity even through translation, Judy Millar’s The Rules of Partial Existence reads like a murky translation — not from one language to another but from writer's mind to pzper. The prose is an impenetrable tangle of allusion that sounds President of the Jane Austen Society of North America, North Vancouver's Eileen Sutherland, says dance is of special interest to Austen fans because so many of her plots hinged on social by-play _ at balls. “During that era marriage was a career for a woman, and balls amounted to a kind of job inter- view — there were a lot of rules and rituals surrounding them.” © music * drama ¢ clowning | from Vancouver to London from Moscow to Tokyo Over 500 performances «¢ Ail tickets under $10 VANCOUVER FRINGE FESTIVAL ON NOW TILL SUNDAY, SEPT. 20 Central Box Office: 85 E. 10th & Quebec VanCity Ba Guide/Info: 873-3646 or Coast 1040 Superphone 280-6000 Although somewhat over- populated, the story mixes nar- ratives from several disparate lives and links their concurrent experi- ences with the complexities and transcendence of human experi- ence. Other stories, such as Circle of Eve, baffie the reader with confus- ed time sequences and abstruse prose, making The Rules of Partial Existence a disappointing partial read. mystical but never coheres into meaning. In her introduction, Millar states, “I quickly saw ... the impossibili- ty of ever fully conveying the life of a country in fiction. | grew ... to be satisfied with parts.” - Of course, modernist fiction is characterized by its insistence on parts, but there has to be an in- visible path for the mind to link up these parts. Millar s first story Elephant in Taxi is, at best, cryptic. It attempts to convey (I think} a dream set in Kathmandu: “The elephant has swallowed the dream. The taxi’s become dinner. One two three four. Round the tips of the mountains you saunter.” Evocation is simply not enough for the poor reader who feels whisked away in a word taxi with no destination. The story Book ot the Dead is more successful. 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