In 1977, Yaakov Shabtai published a novel in Israel called Zikhron dvarim, which means A Memory of Things. If you took the English mistranslation of Proust’s title À la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things Past, and translated that as concisely as possible into Hebrew, you’d probably get Zikhron dvarim. The novel is Proustian in many ways: the sentences are long and intricate; paragraphs go on for pages (in fact, Zikhron dvarim consists of one unbroken paragraph); the central characters are idle and irresolute; one of the principal subjects is decay and degeneration; the cast of characters is vast (over a hundred in Zikhron dvarim); time is fluid and keeps slipping between past, present, and future as the novel unfolds; Judaism and metaphysics are both central preoccupations. When the novel appeared in an English translation in 1985, four years after the author’s death of a heart attack at the age of 47, it was entitled Past Continuous, perhaps once again an oblique reference to Proust’s masterwork, and the single paragraph was broken up into numerous ones.
It’s hard to know how to read a work like Past Continuous. Do you break it up into arbitrary fifty-odd-page chunks and read it over a few weeks (as I did) or do you attempt to read it straight through, taking only as many breaks as necessary for doing the more mundane things in life (sleeping, eating, working, cleaning, cooking, exercise, e-mails, family time, and so on—though one could argue that those things are no more mundane than the act of reading)? I wish I had taken the latter course, as the breaks I took made it hard to remember some of the characters, and even some of the important events. I think it would have been a richer experience had I allowed myself to be immersed in the novel’s strange meander, characterized by sentences that flow from one character to another, from one time period to another, without a break (reminding me of both José Saramago and Edward P. Jones).
The novel centers around three unhappy, indecisive men, best friends, whose relationships with women are terrible. Goldman is divorced and has little interest in them; Caesar is also divorced and is what we might call a sex addict; Israel has remained unmarried and, while usually extraordinarily calm, gets uncommunicative, angry, and unreasonable when he’s with his lover. I found all three annoying, but the novel is also about their families, whose dysfunctions and stories are rich and strange.
When Past Continuous was first published, it was hailed as a masterpiece and seemed to be a work of major and lasting importance. Now it is little read, at least here. I don’t know why. Perhaps the vogue for novels about indecisive men (like the protagonists of Saul Bellow’s, John Updike’s, and Philip Roth’s works) has waned; perhaps the long sentences and lack of a clear plot are forbidding; perhaps it’s because the novel seems disengaged from political or social issues; perhaps it’s because it’s yet another Israeli novel without a single Arab character, and therefore feels insular; perhaps it’s because it makes so many demands upon the reader while offering no advice, redemption, or beautiful prose. Or perhaps Proustian books simply no longer appeal . . .