The Forbidden Book
Dec. 6th, 2024 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Forbidden Book, Sacha Lamb, 2024 novel. This was an instant top-priority add to my reading list when I heard about it, after how much I loved When the Angels Left the Old Country. I ended up really liking some things about it, but I don't think it's as strong a book as Angels. I definitely think Lamb is doing stuff I'm interested in and I'll want to read all the next things they write, but I don't have that "everyone needs to reeeead this" feeling.
Discussion with spoilers:
Stuff I liked: the setting was fascinating, city vs village, the details of life like where do you buy a meal, or the bathhouse, the factions (some barely seen but still felt) of the kahal and the Hasidim and the gentiles, the different languages different people could speak or read (Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian). I liked that Lamb leaned toward never explaining anything (I don't think the book ever says "Esrog is in the Russian Pale of Settlement" or that it's the 19th century, just that there are Russian schools and they're building trains), did not define most of the Hebrew or Yiddish, and did not include a glossary - if you know you know, if not you can guess. It felt immersive and adult (plus I'm sure I enjoyed feeling like enough of an insider to know words like tzedakah or siddur, or to recognize with my baby Hebrew that kahal is probably the same root as kehillah).
There's a lot of neat stuff going on here with dybbuks and gender, and with names - Sarah, Soreh, Sorel, Israel, Isser, Alter, Isser-Alter, Alter-Sorel, Alter-Yisrael. Hebrew vs Yiddish code-switching, masculine vs feminine endings. "Alter" apparently means "old" in Yiddish and is what they would call a sick baby to try to fool the Angel of Death into looking for someone younger, as well as the obvious English meaning. Clever, nicely done stuff.
My absolute favorite line involved the father, who has been a plot presence but offscreen, finally encountering Isser-Sorel and examining their face, recognizing first one then the other. ""Israel?" he said, in a tone of confusion, then leaned closer, blinking as if he too had been blinded. He lifted his empty hand to their face, tucked his fingers under their chin, and turned their head from side to side, scrutinizing every angle of their features as if it were a difficult holy text, written without vowels. "Soreh?"" The whole metaphor of their face as the root word, that can be read as the boy or the girl depending on what you do with the vowels, aaaaaah that's so good.
Sadly what did not work so well for me was the plot. The mystery was great as an excuse for everyone to run around showing us Esrog, but the last act left me pretty confused. There are *two* Angels of Death? Was that foreshadowed in any way? (Sam for Samael, I guess?) Who is Borysko, again? Like, they just said, but, sorry, who? He's Ostap's brother? And he and Ostap thought killing Isser would ingratiate them to Kalman, or they tried to torture Isser to get the book and didn't mean to kill him, I guess? And go back to there's two angels and one is the werewolf? Is that related to why Sorel was a fox in her dream? I felt like Lamb was trying to do something really interesting with the book/contract holding off death in the city but also holding off change/modernity, and the risk/implication that by letting in change they might be letting in death (I'm not sure exactly where we are in time but probably there are pogroms coming because that's what happens, right?), but it didn't quite land for me. I needed something a little more vivid on the page to show me what it meant for Agrat to get Wednesday and Friday nights, to understand the stakes of the contract. And then Agrat is going to be Sorel?? And Shulem-Yontif is going with Alter to Odessa? I'm not sure if the end needed to be longer or slower or if there needed to be more setup earlier but those last few chapters were just "wait, what?" every other page. Not the strongest ending. :/
Discussion with spoilers:
Stuff I liked: the setting was fascinating, city vs village, the details of life like where do you buy a meal, or the bathhouse, the factions (some barely seen but still felt) of the kahal and the Hasidim and the gentiles, the different languages different people could speak or read (Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian). I liked that Lamb leaned toward never explaining anything (I don't think the book ever says "Esrog is in the Russian Pale of Settlement" or that it's the 19th century, just that there are Russian schools and they're building trains), did not define most of the Hebrew or Yiddish, and did not include a glossary - if you know you know, if not you can guess. It felt immersive and adult (plus I'm sure I enjoyed feeling like enough of an insider to know words like tzedakah or siddur, or to recognize with my baby Hebrew that kahal is probably the same root as kehillah).
There's a lot of neat stuff going on here with dybbuks and gender, and with names - Sarah, Soreh, Sorel, Israel, Isser, Alter, Isser-Alter, Alter-Sorel, Alter-Yisrael. Hebrew vs Yiddish code-switching, masculine vs feminine endings. "Alter" apparently means "old" in Yiddish and is what they would call a sick baby to try to fool the Angel of Death into looking for someone younger, as well as the obvious English meaning. Clever, nicely done stuff.
My absolute favorite line involved the father, who has been a plot presence but offscreen, finally encountering Isser-Sorel and examining their face, recognizing first one then the other. ""Israel?" he said, in a tone of confusion, then leaned closer, blinking as if he too had been blinded. He lifted his empty hand to their face, tucked his fingers under their chin, and turned their head from side to side, scrutinizing every angle of their features as if it were a difficult holy text, written without vowels. "Soreh?"" The whole metaphor of their face as the root word, that can be read as the boy or the girl depending on what you do with the vowels, aaaaaah that's so good.
Sadly what did not work so well for me was the plot. The mystery was great as an excuse for everyone to run around showing us Esrog, but the last act left me pretty confused. There are *two* Angels of Death? Was that foreshadowed in any way? (Sam for Samael, I guess?) Who is Borysko, again? Like, they just said, but, sorry, who? He's Ostap's brother? And he and Ostap thought killing Isser would ingratiate them to Kalman, or they tried to torture Isser to get the book and didn't mean to kill him, I guess? And go back to there's two angels and one is the werewolf? Is that related to why Sorel was a fox in her dream? I felt like Lamb was trying to do something really interesting with the book/contract holding off death in the city but also holding off change/modernity, and the risk/implication that by letting in change they might be letting in death (I'm not sure exactly where we are in time but probably there are pogroms coming because that's what happens, right?), but it didn't quite land for me. I needed something a little more vivid on the page to show me what it meant for Agrat to get Wednesday and Friday nights, to understand the stakes of the contract. And then Agrat is going to be Sorel?? And Shulem-Yontif is going with Alter to Odessa? I'm not sure if the end needed to be longer or slower or if there needed to be more setup earlier but those last few chapters were just "wait, what?" every other page. Not the strongest ending. :/
