Abstract

This article explores the ethical commitments of Grossman’s novel that derive from its attunement to living beings at the most fundamental level of life. The novel’s absorption in the textures and rhythms of ordinary experience supports an ethic of animate being that takes in the human and the animal, as well as the animal vitality of dirt and ground, hillside and desert. Thus Grossman honors the quixotic quest of his characters to resist the political demarcation of territorial claims, whether to bodies or to land.

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