Of Time and Memory
Pinsker, Sanford
Of Time and Memory The Illuminated Soul Aryeh Lev Stollman New York: Riverhead Books, 2002, 274 pp., $23.95 REVIEWED BY SANFORD PINSKER The Far Euphrates, Aryeh Lev Stollman's first novel,...
...The novel's complicated, elaborately embroidered plot is where this happens most dramatically and most effectively...
...The book is described by one reviewer as "a niminative and seductive fairy tale, in which the soul is personified by a beautiful and cultivated woman...
...Indeed, it is, for Stollman, where neuroscience and the soul finally meet...
...Of Time and Memory The Illuminated Soul Aryeh Lev Stollman New York: Riverhead Books, 2002, 274 pp., $23.95 REVIEWED BY SANFORD PINSKER The Far Euphrates, Aryeh Lev Stollman's first novel, dealt with the construction of the Jewish soul...
...In Stollman's latest book, The Illuminated Soul, Joseph, the protagonist, is a world-class "expert on brains," someone who studies "the convolutions and neuronal layers where reason and consciousness reside...
...Set in Canada after World War ?, a young Joseph watches as his mother takes in a border who shares the details of her wandering life, along with the secret of the Augsberg Miscellany, a richly decorated manuscript that narrowly escaped being an exhibit in Prague's Museum for an Extinct Race...
...The result is magical realism in a Jewish key, a tale as strange as it is compelling and one that operates as yet another example of what Joseph calls the "miraculous loom on which we constantly weave back and forth and back again, where memory and time are densely laid down in the most intricate and compact way...
...Sanford Pinsker is Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College...
...Its protagonist, like Stollman himself, is an interventional neuroradiologist able to yoke science with kabbalah...
...The mysterious woman is Eva Laquedem Higashi, whose complicated tale that lies at the center of Joseph's tale...
...He is also best known for The Illuminated Soul, a small, extremely curious book published after his retirement...
Vol. 27 • February 2002 • No. 1
