Book Review of Dinner at the Center of the Earth
Dinner at the Eye of the Globe
Equally a storyteller, Nathan Englander has always excelled at showing the cracks and fissures in insular groups that seem, to the outsider, homogenous: Orthodox Jews, Holocaust victims, even other writers (one of the most fractious tribes in existence). In a singular example from the brusque story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," a survivor, upon coming together a man whose number indicates he was three people ahead in line when they were tattooed, irritably calls his beau sufferer a "cutter."
In the novel Dinner at the Centre of the Earth, Englander has a similar goal, just on a larger scale—namely, to tell the fraught history of Israel and Palestine, and the players, large and small, who created it. These include prime minister and Ariel Sharon — known here as "The General"; Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, whose peace plan devolves in a few moments; and the notorious battles that make the countries' names as bitterly contested as their borders.
But although Englander makes u.s.a. witness to larger-than-life events, this is not a novel of historical accurateness, but of historical intimacy. The book'due south characters are all satellites of the nameless Z, a turncoat spy held in a blackness site in the Negev desert by Sharon. There is Sharon's loyal assistant Ruthi, whose son becomes Z's baby-sit; Farid, who funnels terrorists coin from a redoubt in Deutschland and is Z's downfall; Shira, the spy who brings Z in; and Shira's beloved mapmaker, a Palestinian who sketches the borders of a two-state solution that will never come to be.
These fantastic parties are brought to u.s. in the quotidian. Z's guard has nicknamed his cell "The Peach Pit" "for no good reason other than he was home smoking a joint and reading the Hebrew subtitles of a Beverly Hills 90210 rerun with the sound turned off when he got the call for a task." Ruthi spends her days at Sharon's bedside, where he lies in a blackout, "waxed and rouged like a Red Delicious." The turncoat Z himself is only caught from because he ventures out of his hideout in Paris in one case a day for a dish of sharp feta.
You could be forgiven for thinking Englander wrote the book while in a perpetual land of hunger. (The General'due south son is shot while a bowl of salted almonds and fat figs sit down at his side.) Just in this novel, food is the civil conduit for incivility. How are explosives bought? Over a German pastry spread. 1'southward Jewish identity erased? While swapping a yarmulke for a bar of chocolate. A secret peace talk held? Over a watermelon and feta salad. And where do border-crossed lovers meet for their Dinner at the Middle of the Earth? Over candlelight in the tunnels from Gaza to Israel that are existence built to ferry the instruments to destroy it.
Generally, there are two means people write about State of israel-Palestine disharmonize: to take a side, or to take no side. Englander's brilliance is in showing that sides, like the two states, are constantly shifting. Z's effort to level the scales but makes him realize, to his surprise, both his altruism and his betrayal take killed innocent children. When he asks his guard for help in existence released and the soldier scornfully, affectionately asks him, "sure...How did taking an idiotic moral stand piece of work out for you?", he could be referring to either.
Z's story comes to an stop at a glorious and devastating moment — when we finally discover why he became a spy for Israel, and then betrayed it. "His Jerusalem, his Israel, his end" began at his American suburban Yeshiva, as far from a blackness site as i could go. In that location, he was "a little boy, with a heavy prayer volume and a yarmulke, like a soup bowl turned over and resting atop his head" when, in a game, his teacher lifts him and pretends to wing him to Israel. In Englander's brutal, beautiful masterpiece, it is such pocket-sized moments that brand up the breadth of history. In this volume, they take our breath away.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/547560201/spies-betrayal-and-some-really-good-food-in-dinner-at-the-center-of-the-earth
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