What drove Samson? - Rated 
Unlike the other volumes I have read in the Canongate series of Myths Retold, this book about the myth of Samson is not a novel, a retelling of an ancient myth into a modern setting, but rather a minute and scholarly examination of the biblical text, picking up every tiny nuance and finding significances in the way it is told that would escape the average reader (though Talmudic scholars have pored over them in the past). For example, the simple sentence that Samson's father Manoah `rose and followed his wife' should show us that how weak he was, for, as a Talmudic commentator had it, ` a man does not walk behind a woman on the road - not even his wife'.
The story narrated in the Bible is full of action, but is silent about the thoughts of the different characters in it. These silences Grossman fills out with ever more subtle psychological speculations, in the course of which Samson appears not so much as the `thug' or `the most stupid character in the Bible' for which one your reviewers takes him, and more as an inarticulate and tortured being, conscious of being driven from his conception onwards by a God-given destiny which makes him unhappily different from other men, something that also sets an uneasy distance between him and even his parents, so that he has never ever, from birth onwards, been truly loved. Deep down, he longs to be like `every other man', and perhaps it is that that makes him reveal his secret to Delilah.
Though Samson has at times been `read pejoratively in the Jewish tradition', he is also `inscribed in the Jewish consciousness as a national hero and a symbol'. Grossman, an Israeli, is a critical analyst of many aspects of Israeli attitudes and policies, and at one point he comments on the many echoes of the story in the position of Israel in particular: perhaps its strength is also a liability. He sees both Samson and Israel as troubled by `a deep existential insecurity'. I was expecting this line of thought to culminate in Grossman expressing the fear that out of its very strength Israel might one day bring the whole structure of the Middle East crashing down, in an apocalypse that would spell not only the destruction of her enemies but of herself also. He does not say so - but I wonder whether I dare speculatively interpret his silence in this not so far-fetched way?
Subtle and stunning - Rated
This is such a subtle and stunning book I can't recommend it highly enough. At first glance an analysis of a short Bible story may not appeal to everyone but the analysis not only draws out the complex humanity of the protagonist's predicament but in doing so it also draws out the humanity in the reader him/herself. The understanding achieved as you finish the final page is quite profound. You won't forget reading this book and will never be the same person again once you have.
A brilliant little book - Rated
David Grossman is for my money the greatest living Israeli writer. His late 80s novel 'See Under: Love' is significant as being one of the first, belated attempts by an Israeli writer to achieve some kind of imaginative sense of the cost of the Holocaust. His non-fiction book 'The Yellow Wind', a series of interviews with Palestinians, is famous in Israel for having more or less predicted the first Intifada. His last novel 'Someone To Run With' takes stock of the corruption and moral bankruptcy of modern Israeli society. He has written passionately and angrily about the plight of the Palestinians, which is more than you can say for many of his contemporaries. I can only assume that the reason he isn't read in English-speaking countries as much as he ought to be is that the Western, English-speaking readership for serious fiction has some sort of preconceived notion that Israeli writers have nothing to say to them.
They couldn't be more wrong. The other review of this book is remarkably insensitive to where Grossman is coming from. Kenneth Tynan says somewhere that what tends to move us in some kinds of writing is what it must have cost the writer to write it in the first place; I, as a very minor writer myself, am extremely moved by Grossman's agonised depiction of Samson's plight, the tragedy of a man who never really understood himself (how unlike the tragedy of Oedipus, where a man's search for self-knowledge ends up destroying him). Samson, in all his helpless incomprehension, his self-pity, his mixture of almost casual tenderness and outbursts of manic violence, is a hero to many Israelis, and in writing about him Grossman is taking a central myth of Israel on the chin. It's no coincidence that the open secret of Israel's nuclear capacity is sometimes referred to as the 'Samson option' - the unspoken threat that any country that tries to invade Israel will call down nuclear devastation, even if it threatens the existence of Israel itself, as it surely would.
Grossman himself is a strong critic of Israel's government, and his own son was killed in the 2006 Lebanon war; talking about Samson is not, for him, a polite exercise in playing about with myths, but a burning contemporary issue. This book is, among other things, an attempt on the part of a secular Israeli to explore the murkier and angrier depths of the Jewish imagination. It's a tribute to the secular, literary imagination that Grossman, on the strength of this book, understands the Israeli right a lot better than they will ever understand him. I salute him and recommend this book to anyone who is interested in good writing and/or the Middle East.
Missing the obvious - Rated 
Grossman is a Samson apologist, he gives this violent, lawbreaking thug far more credit of action and depth of character than he deserves. Grossman gives many convoluted arguments to excuse his actions, which fall short or simply don't convince. He also misses the most blinding obvious characteristic of Samson that he is without equal the most stupid character in the Bible, lumbering from on disaster to another. Of the Canongate Myth series this contribution is the worst.
|
