The Book Of Intimate Grammar
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Again displaying the special insights into adolescent psychology previously seen in See Under: Love , Israeli novelist Grossman has fashioned a powerful, emotionally devastating novel that chronicles a young boy's fears, anguish and breakdown. Aron Kleinfeld is 11 and a half when we meet him and his crass, ill-bred parents in a seedy Jerusalem housing project. Sensitive and imaginative, he is a great dreamer and ringleader of escapades among his circle of friends, though they are beginning to scorn his childish fantasies. Other signs of stress soon appear: his parents' anxious references to Aron's slow growth and his own awareness of his short stature and scrawny physique, coupled with his observation of the signs of puberty in his pals, make Aron acutely self-conscious and arouse feelings of humiliation and self-hatred. Aron, reluctant to mature socially, psychologically and physically, becomes so revolted by the adult world of hairy armpits and sex and complex, mediated feelings that he eventually feels that ``having a body is itself a defect.'' Yet the reader's sympathy for this naive, gauche nebbish grows in proportion to Aron's suffering, as Grossman brilliantly creates Aron's agonized stream of consciousness. Painfully lonely, feeling rejected by family and friends, to Aron ``. . . words had come to be utterly inward, whispering a grammar so intimate and tortuous they could never break forth into the light.'' Grossman's portrait of Aron will stand as a classic study of adolescent turmoil set against the muted backdrop of his country's imminent, violent and compromised coming of age in the Six-Day War of 1967.
