Just finished The Cannibal Galaxy by Cynthia Ozick (162 pgs).
Cynthia Ozick is one of my favorite authors, but this is the first novel by her I’ve read—she mostly writes shorts stories and essays. Even so, this barely counts as a novel—it’s more of a novella, really.
The book’s about a French Jew, Joseph Brill, who escapes WWII and founds a school in Milwaukee that teaches what he calls the “Dual Curriculum”: half Jewish history and Biblical exegesis, half Enlightenment philosophy and literature.
When the book opens Principal Brill is pondering the mediocrity of his school and his students—and, by extension, his life. Then he gets a new student, Beulah Lilt. Beulah is worse than mediocre, but her mother, Hester Lilt, is an accomplished philosopher, and Brill is immediately awed by her, and admits her daughter to the school despite his faculty’s reservations.
The great thing is that Brill is infatuated with her not because of her looks—though he notices that, too—but because of her intellect. He’s excited to talk on such an intellectual level with someone, and flattered that she’s willing to talk philosophy with him. And he’s continuously shocked by just how untalented Beulah, the daughter, is.
I have to say, this wasn’t my favorite Ozick book. One of the things I most love about her is her prose style—she has this amazing way of writing that manages to be both over the top and tightly controlled at the same time. But I thought that the writing in this book was a little…muted, compared to her normal writing. And though I’m interested in all of the themes in this book—Judaism and assimilation, education, genius, parenthood—I found the plot pretty boring. It moves back and forth between Brill in the present day, at the school, and flashbacks to his life in France before and during the war. The flashbacks were definitely the best part of the story, but they make up a pretty small part of it, and couldn’t save the book as a whole from a plot that doesn’t go anywhere interesting.
If you want to read Cynthia Ozick, I’d recommend Levitation, instead. Or, if you’re in to that sort of thing, her essays.
@internrachel, @julia1