Writing in the Dark, By David Grossman

The Independent

Reviewed by Michael Glover

Sunday, 23 November 2008

The Israeli novelist David Grossman has always written from a position of impassioned embattlement. Born in the 1960s, he has matured as man and writer during the very same decades that Israel itself has been coming into being as a self-sufficient state and nation. His books have alternated between fiction and non-fiction, tacking between one and the other.
For Grossman, there is no possibility of creating a body of writing which is not intruded upon by politics. This new book, a slim volume of essays which characteristically shifts from fiction to politics and back again, reflects upon his own maturing as man and writer, and it continues to ask – as his fiction always asks – the most difficult and searching questions of the state to which he belongs.
In this book Grossman analyses his own fictional procedures. What has his writing been good for? How has it helped him to engage with the day to day realities of life in a fragile state surrounded by enemies? Fiction, he argues, has helped him to fight back against the entrenched belief that Israel is a victim. He speaks of claustrophobia, even of a sense of suffocation. How to rid oneself of such feelings? Writing about reality is one way of fighting back, of throwing off the miasma of fear, impotence, paranoia. Why? Because to tell a story is one way of organising the world, and by so doing one changes that world. It is to know yourself, and to know, to get level with, and even to encompass, that ever threatening Other. It is a way of coming to know that Other from within as yet another striving human being such as oneself; even to delve down as far as those parts of him "that deter and threaten".
This is a powerfully humanistic vision for fiction. It gives back to fiction a mighty role for good, if what Grossman says is true. "Literature," he thunders, "reminds us of our duty to demand from ourselves the right to individuality and uniqueness." The message sounds almost touchingly old-fashioned, that literature should be thought to be capable of offering us counsel and even be capable of healing us of our terrible, distorted perceptions of reality. Can literature really be that important?
Yes, says Grossman, to a novelist such as himself who grew up in an atmosphere of silence – the silence of the unspoken horrors of the Holocaust – and fragmented whispers; who grew up in a society haunted by the dread of death; who grew up in a society which has known strife, both internal and external, for the best part of 40 years, and which still longs for the easy sense of everydayness that more settled societies enjoy almost as a matter of course. Literature has its place of honour amid all this terrible fragility. Why? Because literature, at its best, individualises; it plucks the reader out of the anonymous masses. It "redeems for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions". '
This kind of vision has no time for the nonsense of abstruse theorising about the nature of fictive language. Literature is weaponry in a battle to the death against the forces of destruction and unreason.
Grossman's words have a tremendous, forceful eloquence about them, from first to last. They are a delight to read, and all the more so because his English is slightly fractured, slightly odd. Their power reminds one of the poems Miroslav Holub wrote under Communism. Here are writers witness to injustice, fighting back against the corrosive power of ossified attitudes and partial truths.
Will they still sing quite so impressively, and quite so eloquently, when Israel achieves that state of peaceful normality, that lovely continuum of existence for which Grossman longs with all his heart and soul? What will there be left to write about then? What will it be like to write without the quickening dread of the enemy at the gates?