What is less satisfying are the answers he puts forward in either of the two novels mentioned above.
What is attractive in Singer for me is the hunt, the inquiry, the critique of modern ideas, values and lifeform, and the attempt to figure out what to replace it with. In The Penitent it is replaced by a conversion to a rigorous form of Orthodox Judaism. Replacement with what? In The Magician of Lublin it is replaced with rigorous penitential confinement.
It seems more like it should have been The Convert than The Penitent.ĭespite the difference in setting and plot, both novels deal with a very similar philosophical issue: the rejection of modern life, understood as the pursuit of wealth, pleasure and sex, and the replacement of it with…. But the stories and themes are quite similar with, on my view, The Magician of Lublin being much more worthy of the title The Penitent than the book which carries that title. Penitent set in Israel in more modern times). The novels are different in time and place (Magician is set in Poland in the late 1800s and I have a bad memory, read a lot and often forget what I’ve read – same with movies.) I pulled up my comments on The Penitent and was simply astonished at how similar the two books are, and that my thinking about that novel two years ago is nearly identical with my response to The Magician of Lublin now. (One of the key reasons I began to write out comments on books I read was much less for others than for myself. I opened a file for “Singer” and was surprised to find that I had read and commented on his novel The Penitent just two years ago. Whenever that is, the issue I have to then figure out is: with whom am I in disagreement? The main character, the author or both? I was still undecided about this when I sat down to at least start some notes. Not in the writing itself it is a very well-told and gripping story. Isaac Bashevis Singer: THE MAGICIAN OF LUBLIN THE MAGICIAN OF LUBLINĪfter finishing this novel and thinking about it a few days as I took my daily bike rides, I realized I had certain discomforts with it.
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