Time blew like a steppe wind into an empty future.
In The Fixer, Bernard Malamud tells the story of Yakov Bok, a poor Jew living in Ukraine during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. The novel opens with Yakov at a point of frustration in his life: he works as a "fixer," a sort of all-around handyman, but he can't make enough money and is always broke; he wants to be a father but his wife, who has been unable to conceive in five years of marriage, has just run off with another man; he is tired of the poor, grinding misery that surrounds him in the shtetl where he has lived his whole life. Thinking that life can't get much worse, Yakov leaves his shtetl and goes to Kiev where he soon finds out just how much worse it can get. A young boy is found murdered and the authorities, acting out of the deep anti-Semitism of the era, decide that he has been killed in a Jewish blood ritual. Yakov is targeted as the murderer and thrown in prison.
Malamud spends the first half of the book bringing us to the point of Yakov's imprisonment. He gives us descriptions of Yakov's life in the shtetl, long conversations between Yakov and his father-in-law, and lots of detail on the various adventures and misadventures that Yakov has when he arrives in Kiev. All of this is necessary stuff--it gives us a sense of Yakov's character, makes us aware of the world he moves in, and shows us exactly how he comes to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and therefore accused of a murder he didn't commit--but none of it grabbed me. Yakov is a likeable enough character and there are some moments of sly humor in Malamud's descriptions, but the quality of the writing is nothing special and I felt no strong connection to the story.
But then Yakov goes to prison and book is suddenly raised to another plane. It is no longer about the daily tribulations of life as a Russian Jew in the early 20th century; instead it becomes a book about suffering, endurance, injustice, innocence. The plot shrinks smaller and smaller as Yakov's world shrinks to the cell where he is held in unending solitary confinement, but somehow the miniscule incidents of the prison cell are vastly more compelling than the big events of the first half of the book. After a while, I realized that the book it most reminded me of was Cormac McCarthy's The Road. There was the same awe at how much a person can survive, the same sense of an unending bleak existence broken only by minor fluctuations in fortune, the same awareness of death as a constantly hovering presence. I read the second half of The Fixer in the same way that I read The Road--with my heart in my throat, waiting for anything good to happen to Yakov, no matter how small, so that I might put the book down and feel that he had a chance of surviving until I picked it up again.
I don't want to say too much about the ending. Not knowing how the book would turn out, or how Malamud could possibly bring this story to a conclusion was, I think, an important part of why I got so wrapped up in the book. So I don't want to ruin it for anyone else.
I'm so glad I kept on with this book. When I was 150 pages in, I was utterly convinced that it was a book I would decide had been worth reading even if it never really meant that much to me. And then it caught fire.
Malamud spends the first half of the book bringing us to the point of Yakov's imprisonment. He gives us descriptions of Yakov's life in the shtetl, long conversations between Yakov and his father-in-law, and lots of detail on the various adventures and misadventures that Yakov has when he arrives in Kiev. All of this is necessary stuff--it gives us a sense of Yakov's character, makes us aware of the world he moves in, and shows us exactly how he comes to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and therefore accused of a murder he didn't commit--but none of it grabbed me. Yakov is a likeable enough character and there are some moments of sly humor in Malamud's descriptions, but the quality of the writing is nothing special and I felt no strong connection to the story.
But then Yakov goes to prison and book is suddenly raised to another plane. It is no longer about the daily tribulations of life as a Russian Jew in the early 20th century; instead it becomes a book about suffering, endurance, injustice, innocence. The plot shrinks smaller and smaller as Yakov's world shrinks to the cell where he is held in unending solitary confinement, but somehow the miniscule incidents of the prison cell are vastly more compelling than the big events of the first half of the book. After a while, I realized that the book it most reminded me of was Cormac McCarthy's The Road. There was the same awe at how much a person can survive, the same sense of an unending bleak existence broken only by minor fluctuations in fortune, the same awareness of death as a constantly hovering presence. I read the second half of The Fixer in the same way that I read The Road--with my heart in my throat, waiting for anything good to happen to Yakov, no matter how small, so that I might put the book down and feel that he had a chance of surviving until I picked it up again.
I don't want to say too much about the ending. Not knowing how the book would turn out, or how Malamud could possibly bring this story to a conclusion was, I think, an important part of why I got so wrapped up in the book. So I don't want to ruin it for anyone else.
I'm so glad I kept on with this book. When I was 150 pages in, I was utterly convinced that it was a book I would decide had been worth reading even if it never really meant that much to me. And then it caught fire.