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Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from David Grossman’s most recent novel, Falling Out of Time, which is partly a folk tale, partly a play, and partly a novel in verse. In the story, a man known as the “walking man” sets off in search of his dead son, pacing in ever-widening circles around his village and picking up other villagers who’ve lost their children along the way, like a Pied Piper of bereavement.
“TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE: As they commingle, so two rivers flow into my confluence. I did not know, not this way, that life in all its fullness is lived only there, in borderland. It is as though I never yet have lived, as though all things that happened to me never really were, until you—
WALKING MAN: And he is dead. I understand, almost, the meaning of the sounds: The boy is dead. I recognize these words as holding truth. He is dead, he is dead. But his death, his death is not dead.”
Falling Out of Time can be said to be a strange sort of sequel to Grossman’s previous book, To the End of the Land, which we featured on the podcast in April 2015. Grossman was working on the final draft of that book when his son, Uri, was killed on the last day of the Second Lebanon War.
On May 29 at Bar-Ilan’s Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing Conference, Grossman will read from “Falling out of Time,” and Marcela will interview him. The event is free and open to the public.
Text:
Falling Out of Time by David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen, Vintage International, 2014.
Music:
Buttering Trio – What Is Madness
Ernest Bloch – Schelomo (from Rhapsodie Hebraique)
Max Bruch – Kol Nidrei, Op. 47
Producer: Laragh Widdess
Technical producer: Alex Benish
