The Heart Is Katmandu

Rating:
Summary: a reluctant 5 but if you don't read Hoffman ...
Review: Thru the first fifth or so of these book, I thought I may have finally found a book by Yoel Hoffmann that I didn't love. Because of that, I would strongly urge anyone who has read nothing of Hoffmann's to begin with "Katschen & The Book of Joseph" rather than this book.

In the small units (chapters? prose poems? fragments?) that make up this book, Hoffman builds an understanding (an impression? an empathy?) for the experience of falling in love. This woman loves man loves woman loves child loves mother ... story builds within the individual characters, within the world, within the religious universe in unusual connections: "Now his life, too, seems like a story, except that here there occur the same eruptions that take place on the surface of the sun, and he hears the sound of this burning, like the song which is of this world alone: 'Frere Jacques.'"

While occasionally a line or image seems contrived in a way not evident in his other works, the results are astonishing. At the novel's end the reader has seen barriers and loneliness fall away and love flow in to replace them. This love is physical, sacred and profane as is the world within which the characters live limited (or not?) by time, space, contradition and naming.