The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Heart Is Katmandu by Yoel Hoffman. Trans. Peter Cole
Irving Malin

Yoel Hoffman. The Heart Is Katmandu. Trans. Peter Cole. New Directions, 2001. 144 pp. $22.95.

This is the fourth volume by Hoffman published in the last few years. It confirms that he is the most interesting and experimental novelist in Israel; and it also confirms that New Directions is still one of the most important, daring publishers in America. The plot is simple. Yehoahim, a thoughtful man separated from his first wife, falls in love with Batya, the mother of a mentally challenged infant. Both seem to have no need to converse; they are beyond words. However, the text assumes that even the most common relationships are more complex than we, or the characters, know. Thus the two characters think about their identities, their differences and similarities. Occasionally they speak to us or the author, and often the author speaks back. The distance between Batya and Yehoahim is symbolically patterned by spaces on the page itself. The text is divided into 237 frames and suggests that art cannot be linear. The imagery returns again and again to distances, connections, and attempts at connection. Language itself becomes problematic. For example, frame 140: "Take a word (Yehoahim says to himself). Take a word like son, thy son, thine only son, in that scene where Abraham drew the knife, like ‘yes,’ or like ‘let there be,’ or like ‘Jehovah,’ just so long as you don’t make a mistake, for if you make a mistake creation will take everything back, as when one regrets a momentous act and reverts to no-thing. I can’t afford to make a mistake, he thinks to himself, and, therefore, his lips mouth the only word that holds all of these worlds: Batya." Hoffman’s wonderful book is both a love story and a meditation on the words love and story. It ends with this cryptic sentence: "Everything has its name, and the name has one as well." [Irving Malin]