The Swan Song Of Yaakov Shabtai
Levenberg, Diane
The Swan Song Of Yaakov Shabtai Past Perfect by Yaakov Shabtai; translated by Dalya Bilu Viking Penguin Inc 1987 291 pp, $1895 Reviewed by Diane Levenberg "One long kvetch" is how someone in...
...Perhaps to insure that the fiction dominate the reality, Shabtai created the tale of a man who also feels he is about to die...
...Shabtai worked on Past Perfect with the obsession only a dying man can have...
...It was the last work he completed during the last year of his life...
...Diane Levenberg is associate professor of English at Kutztown University in southeastern Pennsylvania She is the author of Out of the Desert (Doubleday, 1980) Her article, "The Awakening of Henry Roth— A Generation After Call It Sleep," appeared in the April 1988 issue of moment...
...Never having believed he would actually die, I opt for the latter...
...He loves his mother but until she dies he never looks beneath the surface of her unhappiness...
...He likes his wife because she makes him feel comfortable but he never really tries to understand what moves her...
...Meir rarely feels anything for a woman except unmitigated lust...
...Has Meir actually died or has he achieved a spiritual rebirth...
...These last 25 pages are probably worth the price of the book...
...At last he has achieved transcendence—no petty disturbance will ever tear him up again...
...Meir is not only one of the least likable kvetches in recent fiction, but probably one of literature's most indefatigable noshers...
...translated by Dalya Bilu Viking Penguin Inc 1987 291 pp, $1895 Reviewed by Diane Levenberg "One long kvetch" is how someone in Israel described this book...
...What does save the book is the last section, which has been compared to Molly's soliloquy at the end of Joyce's Ulysses...
...To appreciate this novel, one would have to sympathize with Meir's plight— something that would be difficult for anyone with a feminist sensibility...
...However, as beautifully as this section is composed, one is left wondering...
...On the whole, it ieems as though he moved from the scope of Leo Tolstoy and the ingenuity of James Joyce to the preoccupation and self-absorption of a first novelist right out of a creative writing program...
...Swan song" might be a more elegant description— both Shabtai's and also Meir's, who is the main character It takes substantial talent to maintain a kvetch—and even more talent to create a Swan song One reads this book with nostalgia, remembering Shabtai's masterpiece, Past Continuous...
...After making love to his doctor, a figure who in many ways combines the best attributes of his wife and his mother, Meir drifts off into a somnolent reverie recalling his childhood, the beauty of his native Tel Aviv, encounters with friends and finally his own birth...
...He seems to want to sleep with every woman in sight and when he's rejected, or just upset, he gorges himself on cakes, cookies and his mother's specialties prepared for whomever might drop in unannounced...
Vol. 14 • April 1989 • No. 3
