Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Golem Song (Paperback)
Marc Estrin is, above all, a riveting story teller, of the sort to whom children at a campfire would each want to sit closest. I am now reading Golem Song for the third time, with a couple of years gap separating each reading. The first read was a fun "ride" on a fast-moving, witty, erudite but not stuffy book I hated to see the end of. The second time I read it a little more more carefully, and was impressed with its scope and display of a sweeping knowledge of culture and literature.This time I am reading it even more slowly and with a different kind of attention, and am not just knocked out by the staggering intellectual, philosophical, historical, spiritual, psychological and sociological underpinnings of this work and the questions it raises while still managing to entertain the reader, but also moved by its sensitivity and tenderness. It has a subtly holistic structure, in which the author engages, entrances and dazzles us in a way which echoes and amplifies the personality of his main character. And it is really funny.
Estrin plumbs and displays the mind of a profoundly unattractive character, Alan Krieger: a racist, chauvinistic, hateful, brilliant, manic, highly skilled and quite disagreeable individual, whom we literally inhabit during this novel, experiencing from his innards the behavior and viewpoints which, were we merely witnesses, we would only find abhorrent. Instead, because Alan is so real and layered, and has a quick and very associative if peculiar intellect, we almost become the person he is as we enter the world of this tale. His tribal hatred of all others, and the centrality of this hatred to a cobbled-together identity, constantly on the brink of disintegration, speaks to the xenophobia which has driven the atrocities of the past hundred years and more; in getting us to feel it from such an intimate vantage point, Estrin leads us to a powerful confrontation with our own loyalties and hatreds, which therefore provides us with an opportunity to reconsider.
As a pure piece of literature, it is lyrical and very beautiful. Its tone is modern and rhythmic - enough that hip-hop artists could chant whole chapters to their accompanying beats with good effect, yet has a folksy, conversational feel that makes it a pleasurable novel. The vocabulary is so extensive that in the first two readings, I gleaned the meanings of certain words from the context. This time, I am reading it on a Kindle which means I can automatically look up words I don't know, which is important in a text which, somehow in a naturalistic and unpretentious way, drops in such gems as "chthonic" "orchae" and even "galapygeous." Not so handy on a Kindle are translations for the copious references fromYiddish, German, Latin, a smattering of Russian and medical terminology, classical lit, popular culture, classical music, etc., but some of these are translated/explicated in the body of the work, or at least the meaning implied well enough to read without a search engine running.
Estrin is a latecomer to the book writing game, and no youngster, but I believe he will see the day when his will be widely considered to be one of the great authorial voices in the canon of modern American literature.
