Moods
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Yoel Hoffmann—“Israel’s celebrated avant-garde genius” (The Forward)—supplies the magic missing link between the infinitesimal and the infinite
Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul’s hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee—with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by “that great big pill of Prozac.”
Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction—a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to “a praying mantis inclined to melancholy.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Passing thoughts and long-held memories intertwine in Hoffmann's (Bernhard) latest cabinet of curiosities. Hoffmann, one of Israel's most celebrated avant-garde writers, is a professor of Japanese poetry, Buddhism, and philosophy, and his writing here unfolds as a series of koans, challenging and drawing in the reader: "Beginning is everything and needs to contain, like the seed of a tree, the work as a whole." Despite this sure-footed start, the book is full of doubts and switchbacks, a self-reflexive meditation on the usefulness of stories in general. The author pulls back from his impressionistic memories of his adolescence in Ramat Gan, a district of Tel Aviv, in the 1950s, to comment on his current depression, which makes functioning difficult, "as feelings are always troubling heart." Hoffmann's meandering is intensely personal, yet his hope that the cataloguing of thoughts and feelings will lead to some kind of larger understanding beyond the self is entirely universal. Tracing this path with Hoffmann as a guide will stimulate discriminating readers.
