BOOKS
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of the world as children are: grownups who never cease being deranged,
detached, derailed. And certainly this approach works beautifully for Jakob
when he is a child locked into trauma to which the only key is poetry.
Poetic language and imagery invent a rich interior life for a half-dead boy
who is ecstatically reborn during the time he lives on the Greek island with
Athos. But then Athos and Jakob leave Zakynthos and move to Canada.
Mundane life begins. The boy who has been soaking in the poetry of his own
becoming must now be. He is the poet and translator Jakob Beer out in the
world. In Canada, Jakob continues to be shrouded in remoteness and philo–
sophic meditation without the magic of transformation. The move to Canada
seems no more than a blip of biography. Though he marries a lively young
woman, litde of the experience pierces him. He muses: "The poet moves
from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the
immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the myste–
rious implications."
But the mysterious implications are far fewer in Canada. Jakob marries
the highly inappropriate Alex, who goes out with "the kids:' "the cats," "the
crowd."
The price paid for keeping Jakob in the realm of meditation is that he
retreats from us as a character. He is disembodied consciousness, symbol of
our longing to transcend twentieth-century suffering. Paradoxically, this
weakness reinforces the author's novelistic frame, which is that Jakob's med–
itations are culled from Jakob Beer's journals, discovered after his death.
Why, we ask ourselves, must Athos and Jakob move to Canada? Surely not for
novelistic reasons. For matters of record, then:Jakob Beer's real life must have
gone that way. The important events of the novel should be sought in the daz–
zle of its language. Jakob meets his love, Michaela, and he meets Ben, himself
the son of Holocaust survivors (it's not always easy to sleuth out details of
sequence: even the jacket copy shares the author's shying from the explicit).
Ben, who is fated to find Jakob Beer's journals, is deeply touched by the poet–
translator. Freed from his family's muteness, Ben is able to give his own
first-person account of being locked into speechless suffering: "There was no
energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy. Instead,
our words drifted away, as
if
our home were open to the elements and we
were forever whispering into a strong wind."
All that is changed through Jakob's poetry. But again there is a price
to be paid. Poetry saves these lives, but poetry can't do all that much for the
parts of a novel that have to make their far
cl
umsier way through time and
space. Though time passes, there is litde sense in the book of time
building,
in that sturdy yet breathtaking house-of-cards way that belongs to the novel
alone. There is, instead, recapitulation. Ben, a meteorologist, again reads
the world through nature, wind-whipped and breeze-burnished. The
