Book Review: The Beautiful Possible

Rabindranath Tagore: ´Faith is the bird that feeds the light and sings when the dawn is still dark´.

Abraham Joshua Heschel: ´Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart´.

Three friends: Rosalie, Walter, Sol. Three stories intertwined by the strength of the destinies, like a Venn diagram with overlapping areas. 

The Beautiful Possible by Amy Gottlieb gathers stories within the story: stories about survival, about the chain of generations, about unrevealed accidents, the spice-infused love of the Song of Songs or the hopeless hope of the Ecclesiastes/Kohelet. From Berlin to Mumbay and back to the new life in America, the characters are on a permanent alert for translating the world into words, following the pattern of question/answer - Sheelah/Teshuvah - dialogue. There is an almost karmic connection between the characters: Walter, a refugee from Germany, identified as such within the story, a successful professor of comparative religions that spent the war times in the Tagore ashram in India after he ´followed a man wearing a brown felt hat´; Sol, the talented yeshiva student with a bright rabbinical future, and Rosalie, the daughter of a Hasid that before taking over the functions of a rebbetzin and a mother, used to learn together with her father. Around those main characters, there are others - like friends and the couple´s children, especially Maya - who are aimed at completing the course of the story.

Organised chronologically, the chapters start from the 1930s until the beginning of the 2000s. An enormous lap of time that is not always equally eventful or revealing for the geometry of the story. It starts on a very tensed note, the moment when Walter´s father and fiance are killed by the Nazis but this high intensity of the first episode is rarely replicated in the rest of the story. The book is inequal with the first part being more rich in details both about the characters and the course of action. The three characters are young, with an unexplored potential that fades away shortly after caught up in the routine of the everyday life, which may happen in real life but for a book it operates against the initial expectations when the reader looks to get the best of its characters within a very limited amount of time. It´s like that at least until the very end of the book, everyone is resigned to its own fate. I would have expected more development for Sol character, the rabbi that started as an ilui and ended up completely at lost for his destination. 

The dialogues aren´t always flowing naturally, with a certain rigidity that makes the characters themselves belong to a rather cartoon register.

But despite the ups and downs, The Beautiful Possible is a beautiful poem about the strong ties between life and love, the search for the source of life soustenance and the love without end, in the likes of the images projected by the Song of Songs. And as in the case of the Song of Songs, there is more than a meaning assigned to the concept of love. 

This is a book I craved to read for a long time and although I have mixed opinions about the literary formula, the story in itself is beautiful enough to challenge the possible reality.

Rating: 3.5 stars