My friend didn’t recommend this book, exactly, but she did recommend the author, Javier Marias, or at least said she was impressed with him, and this title is what my neighborhood library had on the shelf, so here we are. Dark Back of Time is a book about writing a book, and the book it’s about writing is Dark Back of Time. Marias here recounts the reaction to his earlier novel All Souls, which is set at Oxford University and which apparently was suspected of being a roman a clef. Assuming that All Souls itself, which I haven’t read, but which my friend is, apparently, about to read) contains a bit of that post-modernist inclination toward including comments on the art being created, Dark Back of Time is possibly a book about writing a book about writing a book about writing a book which was itself is about writing a book. True or false (and little in this hybrid memoir/novel can be pinned down as either) it’s true, I’d lay odds, to Marias frame of authorial mind. Toward the end, he says, Some time will have to pass before this voice or writing speaks more clearly and I can tell what it tells, I have to take a certain distance ... I prefer to pause here and wait a while, everything is still changing. By that point, we’ve been through a catalogue of characters, some of whom are involved in All Souls, many of whom are not. The All Souls people are from Oxford and often fancy that they’ve spotted themselves or someone they know in the pages of Marias’s novel. Some are offended at their portraits at first, but all end up by being flattered or indifferent. Marias contends that he never simply recreated people. However, he comes so close--sometimes admitting it, sometimes not--that the line between fact and fiction is not only blurred but obliterated. Along the same lines are explorations of the lives of a number of his acquaintances. Some of them Oxford, some not, some connected with All Souls, some not. But all are united by the difficulty of finding out who they were or what they did. The direction in those cases is the opposite of trying to match All Souls characters to “real” people, some of them contemporary, some of them historical. Marias acts like a private investigator, tracking down newspaper articles, letters, other evidence (some of it reproduced on the book’s pages) attempting to picture the lives of these figures. Whether you start from reality or fiction, the result seems to be the same. What is real and what is not depends on where you stand and who you are. He explicitly debunks any idea that he might be searching for a purpose to it all. Camus-like he declares: Everything is so random and absurd, it’s incomprehensible that we can grant any transcendence whatsoever to our birth or our existence or our death.Unlike Camus, he posits the existence of the Dark Back of Time where all that was expected or foretold, but never happened, people never born or even imagined, events which never manifested in our lives or history, move in some sort of dynamic purgatory and may yet emerge into the light. “This is not fiction,” he says of Dark of Time, “but it must be a story.” To me, that statement nails its weakness. For all its virtues--wonderful ideas, heady prose--there’s not much of a story and no juice. Too much of the head and not enough heart and gonads. There are some wonderful anecdotes, such as the one with the bookstore couple who want to play their own characters in the movie of All Souls, and the scene between Franco and the one-eyed soldier of fortune. However, I’d prefer more show and less tell. Maybe it’s all too subtle for me. I’ll probably be once again overruled by the marketplace.
This book is a black satire, and study of characters far more interesting than they initially appear.Jake Hersh's life has become unravelled. His relationships with his family, his troubles with the law, the questions about his work - everything seems to be coming apart. The early chapters of this book reflect that, as everything in his world is thrown at you, all at once. But slowly, the book starts to build a complete character out of all these fragments, coming together as you see the gears in motion which took Jake to his current situation.In some ways, this is a perfect way to introduce a protagonist this book - Mordecai Richler's sense of humour works best when his characters are unlikeable. The confusing opening keeps you from getting too attached to Jake until you see some of the uglier sides of his personality. By the time you get a chance to like Jake, you understand him, which lets the book come to a nicely satisfying conclusion.This is a book which is ideal to read as part of a book club - not only because a bit of extra motivation might be needed to plow through the first few chapters, but also because it will generate some excellent discussions afterward, I'm sure.
What do You think about St. Urbain's Horseman (2001)?
Overall I would say that this is a book about heroes and how they do and do not help a person deal with their life. It took me a while to figure out what was going on in this book, it seemed to just wander for quite a while but, as with Barney's Version, once I adjusted to the lack of linear plot and just went with it things got better. I thought the generational position of the characters, they are a bit older than the baby boomers, was very similar to Gen-X in being ahead of a huge cohort. Jake provided a good perspective on the world around him as he was between a lot of different cultural groups (British and Canadian, 2 generations, the film world and his old neighborhood, Jews and Gentiles, etc.). Once again Duddy Kravitz is a character--I really need to read his story.
—Mary
St. Urbain’s Horseman says a lot about a troubled race. As a Jew, one’s story is not simple even when period and geography keeps you away from holocaust. If your race is despised should you escape from it or should you preserve it’s values to show you don’t deserve the despise. You have to be racial to guard your own race from racism and show bravery. If you were trampled as a race you should hate to show that you are not a chicken. With all this, like anybody else, you have your own dreams to achieve, relationships to handle and ego to manage. It is very complex.It helps if you have a role model, somebody to follow and revere, so that you can convince yourself it is possible to become such a personality. If you don’t have one, you could give your imaginary personality to someone, to somebody of your own caliber. Somebody less known about and mysterious so that the imaginary personality will not clash with actual. Jake’s selection is Joey, the other J. Hersh. The story is expertly built up gradually revealing past and constructing characters to arrive at the focal scene.
—Uthpala Dassanayake
Richler proves that he has the mettle to deal with a bunch of issues in each book he writes and this one is no exception. Nazis, interracial marriage, the sexual revolution, Duddy Kravitz, bigotry, stolid English characteristics, infidelity and several varieties of angst. At times this book reads a bit like a broken record, especially if it's read with a bunch of other Richler novels - Uncle Abe's diatribe near the end reminded me of another diatribe in Solomon Gursky Was Here; ultimately, however, both diatribes are good enough that my objection is useless. Hail to the King and all that...
—1.1
