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Bearing the Body

A Novel

Picador, November 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-42750-4, ISBN10: 0-312-42750-6,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 304 pages,
Trade Paperback, $14.00

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See All Categories Literature U.S. & Canada: Novels

Growing up, Daniel seemed like a model son: a student activist blessed with easy charm and a fluid intelligence, who believed that he was heir to a better and brighter future. When that dream faded, he drifted from his family and into a rootless life, marked by wasted possibility.

Bearing the Body begins when Daniel’s younger brother, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, learns that Daniel has died in San Francisco. The circumstances are unclear, and the police are involved. Nathan, who suffers from chronic anger and uncontrollable compulsions, travels to New York to inform their father, Sol, of Daniel’s death. Sol is an Auschwitz survivor who has spent most of his adult energy compiling an archive of the fates of Hitler’s victims. Due in part to this obsessive research, he has lost touch with his sons. He nevertheless decides to join Nathan on a trip to the West Coast, where both men hope to learn more about Daniel’s untimely death. In San Francisco they meet Abby and her son, Ben, who were Daniel’s companions in a life that his family never knew about or shared.

A moving study of isolation and its costs, Bearing the Body is a book about history and memory, about family and loss. Most of all, it is a book about the past, which, far from receding quietly, weighs ever more heavily on those who hope to leave it behind.

Praise

"Among the book's most daring sections are those that recall Sol's sufferings during the Holocaust. Rising to this difficult challenge, Havazelet's unsparing narrative has the unintended effect of making much recent fiction on the subject seem like . . . literature that would persuade us the Nazi mass murder occurred in some European suburb of García Márquez's Macondo. Instead, Havazelet's perfect pitch yields wrenching scenes such as the one in which Sol imagines what he would show, and where he would take, his long-dead parents if they came to visit him in Queens . . . Havazelet's novel won’t make you happier, unless it cheers you to admire a writer who doesn't merely describe but actually reproduces experiences that seem simultaneously universal and intimate . . . It can hurt to be shown reality, to be told the truth. But Bearing the Body reminds you that there's nothing else like it."—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

"Havazelet writes with a kind of anatomical precision, his scalpel slicing at his characters to expose the dark reality beneath . . . [Bearing the Body is] the realization of a striking talent."—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

"This sorrowful but beautiful work is richly layered, and Havazelet skillfully evokes the different voices of his characters."—Sarah F. Gold, Chicago Tribune

"Ehud Havazelet . . . knows how to make his fiction a true mirror. There is a thoroughness to the descriptions of this characters' thoughts, actions and conversations that mimics real time. Their voices seem to echo, as if they were being watched not just by their omniscient narrator but also by wise men and women down through generations, gods and goddesses, pillars of civilization."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“This is Ehud Havazelet’s first novel. He received extraordinary acclaim for his first two short-story collections What Is It Then Between Us and Like Never Before. Most short story writers struggle with the weight and expectation that come with a first novel, but Havazelet has catapulted into an entirely new and exciting realm here. His riveting third-person narrative jumps seamlessly among the anxious members of the Mirsky family creating a mesmerizing montage of the private thinking of each of them; about each other, themselves and their place in a world that has been brutally cruel to all of them . . . This novel, more than any I have read in decades, is a masterful meditation on the immortality of familial silence, even for those who have suffered greatly.”—Elaine Margolin, The Jerusalem Post

"As much about the possibility of hope as it is about the legacy of suffering, Bearing the Body first breaks your heart, then heals it . . . expanded in its sympathies, more capable of understanding, and of enduring that understanding. It is a brave and beautiful book."—Mark Slouka, author of The Visible World

"Bearing the Body unpacks one family's American dream as if the angel of history herself were guiding us through the wreckage. A moving and unusual novel."—Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever

"Bearing the Body is an ambitious novel driven by a wonderfully talented writer's sense of history, coupled with a deep compassion for his characters, every one of which is rendered fully and with great wisdom."—Richard Russo

"A somber and labyrinthine novel . . . Havazelet writes with almost hallucinatory acuity of the mind's endless churning of memories, fears, and dreams, of how the body manifests the soul's torment, and of the way the past is forever bleeding into the present, creating a darkly perceptive, transcendently rapturous drama of devastation and renewal."—Booklist

"Havazelet treats painful subjects—the death of an infant, concentration camp scenes—with wrenching understatement, and his depictions of Nathan's therapy sessions provide insight and levity. The novel ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, but what lingers are its portraits of people bearing the weight of their family history."—Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

About the Author(s)

Ehud Havazelet

Ehud Havazelet is the author of two critically acclaimed short-story collections: What Is It Then Between Us? and Like Never Before. He teaches at Oregon State University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

photo: Sigrid Estrada