Wiesel has disdurbed me with his profound writings since I was but a child. Assuredly, he is one of the very best commentators on the Holocaust. He was there. This latest narration concerns his Dyybuk, his therapist and Madness. And who better to listen to than Wiesel? To boot , I am listening to the CD with a superb performance by Mark Bramhall and Kirsten Potter! ( )

Like any other Wiesel book, this is well worth reading. Don't be put off by the philosophy-student-at-2am first 50pp. Chapter 3, starting on p51, begins a different phase of the book and it's a much less claustrophobic experience after that.

Wiesel is justly famous for the memoir "Night". He's not a novelist, frankly, and a less talented writer would have turned this same story into the literary equivalent of waterboarding. Things like, "At times, in an involuntary and unpredictable way, everything spins around and becomes dislocated in my mind. At the slightest little thing, and often for no apparent reason, I weep without shedding tears and I roar with laughter. I'm lonely, terribly lonely, though a crowd surrounds me and hems me in{,}" are...well...clunky, to put it kindly. (That is from p140, the beginning of chapter 12.)

But...and here's the thing...there are passages that soar and look down at us, seeing sharp edges and stark corners where we see fuzz, mist, and shadows: "Against a world invaded by madness, should we use the faith of our ancestors, or our own madness?" (p110) And this is a simple throwaway line in a long dialogue paragraph!

I can almost forgive the non-novel-ness of the book for moments like that. I recommend the book to readers of Robert Pirsig's philosophical maunderings as a corrective, and to readers of Wiesel's own memoir as an act of solidarity with a man whose world contains so much that he can't keep it in, gotta let it out (to quote Stephen Georgiou/Cat Stevens). ( )

Elie Wiesel's latest novel is an often hallucinatory investigation of the inter-relationship between madness and lucidity, responsibility and guilt, both conscious and subconscious, the scars left at childhood by parental abandonment and the brutal events of history alike. It sounds grim, but it is instead largely graceful and revelatory.

The book begins in most difficult fashion: the first 40 pages or so are a seemingly stream of consciousness plunge into madness, a hard-to-fathom discourse on the nature of reality, desire, insanity and loneliness from inside a clearly disturbed if excruciatingly expressive personality. In fact, if this weren't Wiesel, a writer--a person--who entirely has earned my trust and forebearance--I might have given up on the book before coming to the conclusion of this section.

But slowly, gradually, the prose settles into lucidity like leaves swirling and settling to earth after being blown asunder by a fierce gust of wind.

We find our protagonist, Doriel, a now ederly man, invading (there's no other real word for it) his psychiatrist's office for a series of contentious, difficult sessions, and get to read the doctors case notes as well. We learn that Doriel survived the Holocaust in hiding with his father while his mother left to fight with the Polish resistance. Both his siblings, a brother and a sister, have been caught and killed in different manners. Soon after the war, his parents, now reunited, are killed in a car crash.

As Doriel reviews his life, struggling to overcome what he and the doctor both see as a serious mental malaise, we are taken through various descriptions of survivor's guilt, abandonment issues and, more generally, the spiritual trials faced by the religious Jew in the face of God's apparent abandonment of his Chosen People to the fires of WWII. In fact we are taken through a range of encounters that illustrate the extremes of post-WWII Jewish experience. We see Doriel's time spent in Jerusalem with religious Jews so fervent in their adherence to ancient teachings that they are anti-Israel, based on their belief that their should be now righteous Jewish state until the Messiah arrives to consecrate it. But from there, we meet a man who has not only fled from this community, but embraced Israel's existence to the point of becoming an agent in Mosad, the Israeli CIA.

Little by little, through the stories Doriel tells, some to his doctor and some directly within his narrative, and even through the doctor's perspective of her experiences with this most troubling patient, we piece together a life and a world complex in its layered ambiguity, but entirely recognizable for all its blind alleys, frustrations and metaphysical trap doors. There are joys and victories as well; that's made abundantly clear.

I don't often include excerpts in my write-ups, but here are a few that illustrate the texture of Weisel's writing in this book, obviously much better than I can describe it:

On the loneliness brought on by survivor's guilt:

Like madness, solitude is fear.

A solitary man is a man who is afraid. A man who is afraid is a solitary man. When solitude enters me, it becomes me. Solitude emerges unexpectedly when only the body belongs to me, but also when I belong to the body all alone. Solitude changes consciousness into a person, a jail that I am afraid of leaving.

Afraid of not understanding anything, afraid of understanding everything. Afraid of loving and afraid of not loving anymore. Afraid of forgetting everything and afraid of not forgetting anything: mangled bodies left lying about the battle field, the slow, implacable death pangs of the survivors. Afraid of experiencing hunger, afraid of having no thirst for anything anymore. Afraid of dying and of living. Afraid of being afraid. Afraid of being alone when no in is here anymore. Afraid of being alone when the loved one is here.

There exists a fear that is not yet death but that is no longer life."

And here is a harrowing one-paragraph description of the experience of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and then the camps that may be the most powerful single paragraph I've read all year:

"I won't tell you what I suffered and lived through there. Human beings became unrecognizable, stripped of everything, beyond everything. For us, the city narrowed to the size of a street, the street to a building, the building to a room, the room to a cattle car; wealth shrank to a bundle of belongings, the bundle to a mess kit, and happiness to one miserable potato. And man, whose destiny is incommensurable, became nothing but a number, and the number became ash."

I know I've run the risk here with these passages of presenting A Mad Desire to Dance as unrelentingly grim, despite my opening claim to the contrary. All I can do is repeat that earlier claim. If you appreciate and/or are in the mindset for a sometimes difficult book about the human existence that ultimately flies on the poetry of its prose and the strength of its insights into the messy human condition, you might be happy you put in the effort to read this book.

So I will leave you with one final passage:

In this ambiguous universe, full of pitfalls and boasts, strength lies in the act of creating one's own lucidity and mastering one's own truth. The person who loves, who creates or re-creates if only for a split second, has already won a victory over the absurdity of fate." ( )

Visit my Jew Wishes website to read my complete review. http://jewwishes.wordpress.com/2009/0...

Wiesel, with his masterful writing skills, has done it again, with a book that is extremely complex, dealing with the primary theme of “madness”, otherwise termed as insanity, depression, melancholia, mania, schizophrenia, and illness. It is not an easy read, and often seems disjointed. That is due to the fact that Doriel Waldman, the primary character, is suffering from what he defines as “madness”, and is jumping back and forth, from one scenario to another in almost manic fashion, while relaying his story to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt.

Elie Wiesel has written a masterpiece, and one that encapsulates all of the facets of “madness”, from fanaticism in religion and spirituality, to harshness and brutality, to mania and obsessiveness, etc. It is as if the reader is inside the mind of a “madman”, what Doriel defines himself as being. But, is he really? You read this intense book about survival and trauma and decide. ( )

Another True Gem

Just a wonderfully written book about love, trauma, inescapable memories of the Shoah, and Freudian psychoanalysis mixed in for good measure. The French-to-English translation of Elie Wiesel's writing is terrific, one can only imagine how good it is in the vernacular.

To be sure, the book's non-linear structure is difficult to read at times, especially the incoherent ramblings of a disturbed old man in the first 50 or so pages. But the story comes together nicely with a interesting twist at the end. There is quite a bit of Freudian philosophy here, so if you're not quite up to date with it, you might want to keep the Internet handy.

Overall, I found "A Mad Desire to Dance" highly engaging, all-engrossing, and wonderfully written. Sure to be another Elie Wiesel classic. ( )