Shattered Vessels: Memory, Identity, and Creation in the Work of David Shahar (review)

"A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house," Matthew reports Jesus as saying. This may be the sorry fate of prophets, but it is not usually that of major novelists. They tend to enjoy both critical esteem and popular acclaim in their own countries, as was notably the case of Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. And this is true too of leading contemporary Israeli novelists such as Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and David Grossman. But it was emphatically not the response accorded David Shahar, neither in his lifetime nor since his death in 1997. He did receive a degree of critical recognition, Gershon Shaked, for instance, in his monumental five-volume, hundred-year history of Hebrew fiction, declaring that his novel sequence is "one of the most important achievements of Hebrew fiction in the period of the State." Shahar was also the recipient of a number of literary prizes in Israel, but never aroused the interest or the enthusiasm of the ordinary reading public. This was not repeated with the translation of his work into French. He was blessed with a translator, Madeleine Neige, of reputedly singular stylistic accomplishment, and his magnum opus, the eight-volume sequence entitled The Palace of Shattered Vessels, won him precisely the kind of general recognition in France that was denied him in his own country. He won a major French literary prize, and the French regularly compared his work to that of Proust.

In Shattered Vessels, Michal Peled Ginsburg and Moshe Ron set out to do justice to Shahar in a book that should bring him to the attention of English speakers interested in Hebrew literature, and hopefully of the Israeli critical establishment too. It is nowhere indicated how they divided the labor of their joint authorship, but the result is a seamless whole, and constitutes a notable contribution to the understanding of Shahar. Though they discuss some of his other work too, they rightly concentrate on The Palace of Shattered Vessels. They are well equipped for the task they have undertaken, not only being as at home in English as in their native Hebrew but writing as professional critics of English and French fiction and with a command of current theory. They have made a correct choice in not attempting a chronological analysis of The Palace volume by volume — the work would not lend itself easily to such an approach — but rather in focusing on five aspects of Shahar's art. They are, in the chapter headings in which they present them: 1. "Flirting with the Uncanny"; 2. "Creation, Painting, and Betrayal in Shahar's Fiction"; 3. "Shahar's Jerusalem"; 4. "Otherness, Identity, and Place"; and 5. "Remembering Proust."

The outstanding chapter in the book is the last, in which the authors confront the repeatedly stated resemblance of Shahar to Proust. In a brilliant analysis, which throws as much light on the art of Proust as on that of Shahar, they show that, though there are indeed resemblances between the two writers, they are really distinguished by their differences. A few examples must suffice. Shahar himself would seem indirectly to have claimed kinship with Proust when, in the opening paragraph of the eight-volume sequence, he makes use of an image of a Japanese paper flower that is also used by Proust in the famous passage describing the eating of the madeleine. The world of Shahar's Palace is brought into being with his opening paragraph in much the same way that Proust's arises from the madeleine, but the differences between the novelists are significant. If the eating of the madeleine embodies the well-known phenomenon of "involuntary memory" in Proust, Ginsburg and Ron point out that in Shahar his narrator's "memory of drawing water from the well — [actually a...