To the Edge of Sorrow
Aharon Appelfeld
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
To the Edge of Sorrow
Aharon Appelfeld
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, Appelfeld suggests with characteristic terseness, entails more than simply the fight to keep breathing.
... Appelfeld gives readers an up-close, deeply moving story of characters haunted by grief and loss yet buoyed by courage and hope in the most adverse conditions.
The uniquely strange atmosphere of Appelfeld’s fiction comes from the fact that, because he could not remember his own past, he was forced to imagine it.
... immediately recognizable as Appelfeld's through its spare, eerily understated approach, which records atrocities from a grim remove. Unlike many of the brilliantly allusive author's novels, this one makes explicit reference to the Holocaust, but there's still a dreamlike quality at work. The naturalness of the setting is in contrast to the artfully detached feel of the dialogue. In Schoffman's translation (his first of an Appelfeld novel), the language lacks the seductive pull of other works by Appelfeld, but the story moves toward its climax with the usual disquieting force.
... [Applefeld's] novels are ahistorical and philosophic, moral dramas that have left the confines of eyewitness testimony for the realm of fable and allegory.
... spirited.