An impressionistic study of pain and persecution.
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Eva, a 21-year-old concentration camp survivor, shares her life, thoughts, and memories in the primary plot line of this moving novel. In a second major story line, Othello, hired by the Doge to lead the Venetian army against the Turks in the late 15th century, reveals his passionate love for Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian aristocrat. These two seemingly disparate stories are connected thematically, rather than narratively, as the book alternates from character to character and across time lines. Two other characters (Eva's uncle and an Ethiopian Jew who immigrates to Israel) have their space here, and a 15th century trial of Jewish money-lenders in Venice also connects obliquely with the Othello story. The novel, which is not linear and does not follow a typical narrative pattern, is very impressionistic, more like a symphony than a traditional novel, with movements and complimentary themes playing in counterpoint to each other, The author experiments successfully with a variety of voices and points of view, switching back and forth through nearly 500 years of history and several pain-filled settings as he illustrates his themes. It is an intense and emotionally involving story of cultural, religious, and ethnic persecution, stunning in its impact. Mary Whipple
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As expected, utterly fantastic.
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I have read several of Caryl Phillips' novels, and they never fail to impress. Although The Nature of Blood focuses mainly on Europeans rather than West Indians or Africans, the themes of belonging and exile, possession and dispossession are the same. He deals with these issues so subtly and with such a personal touch, that the novel never feels didactic, and is easy and beautiful to read. This book will make you think about the people, places and history around you in a different way.
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Moving, disturbing, profound
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This book concerns blood, or rather how we have allowed our notions of blood to determine our cruel actions towards others. It is a book not to be read lightly, nor for those with a weak stomach. It is book full of compassion and wisdom. It is a story that spans centuries, countries, fates, and yet is tersely written, no wasted description, no loss of pace. It ties together the fates of the Jews and the blacks in a way that is moving and plausible. The coda set in modern day Israel brings together the thematic threads - showing too that the Promised Land is not so perfect either; not all the promise was fulfilled. I wept in the Holocaust scenes: the style becomes indirect, impersonal, terribly frank. I have read the same (or similar) elsewhere, but the shock never diminishes. This is a book that should be read because it has real moral force, it has seriousness. It is not (like so much modern fiction) merely a story for its own sake, a tale to shock or provoke, shruggingly amoral, but is clearly and yet poetically telling us about the way we are, the way we think. It is saying: look, this is what the Venetians did to the Jews, how they justified their persecution, this is what the Germans did, what next? And it is also saying: look, yesterday's war heroes are lonely and wistful. No action, no matter how heroic, no decision no matter how right, is without a certain price to be paid. There is much here (historically) that one already knows, but the seriousness and the power of the writing, the structure, the poignancy and the truth of the book: all this is Phillips' achievement.
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A novel that challenges the way we think about oppression.
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In this novel Caryl Phillips considers the nature of oppression and its universality. He tells the story of Eva, a German Jew and her family as they live through their last days of freedom before they are sent to the camps. Running parallel to this story is the tale of Othello attempting to make his mark in a Venice which is segregating and punishing Jews for 'their own good'. Phillips conveys both the whimsical nature of prejudice as well as the terrible impact that it has and still has in society today. Surrounding these stories is the sense of dislocation and injustice that is engendered by indiscriminate discrimination that has been the history of the Jewish people. The novel ends with a modern black woman still experiencing a sense of inferiority in a world that claims to believe in equality. The only mistake to make when reading this book is to assume that Phillips is placing all these experiences under the single title of 'oppression'. He does more than this as he endows his characters with the spirit of resistance that allows them to defy the labelling of the oppressed and the weak. This is a novel that challenges the way we think about people and the way in which we assume that the experience of oppression is a collective experience that denies autonomy.
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