and onwards
5 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days after first retrieving The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer from the library, I have finally read the last of the 47 stories, which translates into 610 pages of IBS’s convoluted story telling and a hell of a lot more residual disturbing images than I care for.
posted by Goldie @ 8:53 PM
2 Comments:
You know, we really must now be at different stages in life. After hearing you obsess over it for months, I finally came to the library here and found a collection of IBS's short stories.
I found them largely enjoyable but completely harmless. They had absolutely no effect on me. Halfway through the collection I concluded that it was a complete waste of time, like when I read my kid siblings' children's books. Fun, but not much value aside from some minor literary cachet...
Do you have an explanation for our different experiences?
--Bella
I don’t think it has much to do with our being in different stages of life, but depends on how deeply you read into and how seriously you take IBS’s work, and what sort of thing would disturb you in the first place. And when I say disturb, I don’t mean that his writing is disturbing in the usual sense that some literature can be, it doesn't necessary lead to the questioning of our very existence and other such weighty philosophical matters. But it's more in how he takes common human characteristics (and more often charactertisics unique to Chassidic Jews) and blows them up in such a way as to make them grossly unappealing. For instance, now when I see a bent over, old scholar, shuffling down the streets of Crown Heights, I think of Singer’s caricatured depiction of such a sight: the bad breath, snarled teeth, miserliness, the dusty living quarters, and of course, the latent sexual desire that can be suddenly and instantly revived in the wake of suitable circumstance. Singer also tends to draw on my superstitious leanings and innate fears of dybbuks, devils, and other such spiritual monsters. And in general, I find his religious disillusionment and mocking censure coupled with his lingering attachment and his almost uncanny appreciation of the decrepit shtetal life, all woven into his twisted tales of misfortune, rather unsettling.
But IBS could just be hitting on a raw nerve, and perhaps his stories are nothing more than childish renditions of a lost world with only hints of his unfulfilled desires, bitter cynicism, difficult childhood, and continuous struggle with religion and G-d.
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