Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_bernsteinj/)
Joshua Bernstein is the fiction editor of Tikkun.
Like Woolf’s soliloquies, Hoang’s cry out in despair, ranging in topic from the death of her sister to the verbal abuses of her then-boyfriend. And yet, like Woolf’s, her language somehow basks in that despair, flourishing even.
Anyone who has followed the demise of Cecil, the African lion, and Walter J. Palmer, his American slayer, can’t help but be struck by the parallels with Hemingway’s classic story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” where a wealthy but timid American bumbles around the African savannah under the protection of a guide, procures a few hides, and ultimately meets his demise.
Lily La Tigresse is unsparing in its critique, but it’s also seminal in terms of launching its indictment of Israel—a society that, in Kimhi’s view, is no more generous or compassionate than the barbarous terrain of Europe, not to mention the U.S.S.R.
Arguably the two most immediate—and in my judgment, truest—books from the Great War, in spite of Hemingway’s assertion that there were none, were written by authors who not only never set foot on the battlefield; neither of them was a male.
The book’s certainly as nostalgic as Tennyson’s Memoriam, and no less melancholic, but unlike legions of other books written on loss, a sweet irony pervades it and makes the work fittingly beautiful, if not hapless to explain the grief that Elise endures.