I so wanted to love this book. I loved the title; I loved the concept of a brilliant, self-contained man at once defending and probing his own psyche, calling himself mad while proving himself saner than the world that tormented him. I loved the way he clashed with his female psychoanalyst; the way she lost her own balance and swayed toward him.
But I did not love the main character. His tight arrogance, his endless fascination with his own inner world and reluctance to make it plain--began to annoy me. Wiesel’s depth and sensitivity come through, yet there’s little heart in this book. Its resolution felt anticlimactic not just because the pacing seemed off, but because I had ceased to care.
That said, the book is filled with profound insights and challenges (perhaps I simply failed the test). “The deepest and most powerful cry, a Hasidic rabbi used to say, is the one we keep locked up in our breast,” Wiesel has his character tell his analyst. “Like remorse. And desire.”
When the patient banters with his analyst--although banter’s the wrong word, there’s no lightness or warmth to the exchanges, just a grim relentlessness, as each plays out his or her own role—he says, “Which leads me to ask you the same question, Doctor: Do you believe in the soul? And if you do, do you find it plausible that, pushed to the limit, it can sink into madness?”
He later reflects that “like madness, solitude is fear.”
One day he remarks, “There’s also religion, Doctor. Let’s not forget the position it occupied in my life. By clashing with reason, it can prevent you from living in reality.”
Yet weeks later, he says, “Doctor, you who belong to another world and another time, you can’t understand Jewish life in small towns—and Brooklyn was a small town, a shtetl—which, in spite of poverty, became lively spiritual centers attuned to the slightest flutter of the Lord’s eyelid.”
Were I that aware, I suspect these words would carve new understandings in my soul. Instead, they left me childishly wishing I could like the man who said them.
—Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
