By Yoriam Kaniuk (Trans: Barbara Harshav)
Restless Books, £17.99
In book IV of the Aeneid, Virgil's hero journeys to Hades to seek guidance from his old dad. Entering the underworld via a cave, Aeneas comes upon the House of the Dead: "Between its dread jambs, is a courtyard where pain/ And self-wounding thoughts have ensconced themselves./ Here too are pallid diseases, the sorrows of age…agonies of the mind… all of these haunting nightmares/ Have their beds in the niches." (The quotation comes from Seamus Heaney's new translation).
This is precisely the territory that the late Yoram Kaniuk's final book inhabits. For Hades, read Ichilov, the vast medical complex in Tel Aviv, where the author spent four months hovering, as he puts it, "between life and death".
His publishers call it a novel, possibly because Kaniuk's disjointed thoughts are recollected in the relative tranquillity of convalescence. But in truth it is a memoir, the record of a journey that takes him to Sheol (which, being Jewish, Kaniuk prefers to Hades) and back. The narrative is a stream-of-unconsciousness, a mishmash of memories, which include: youth in Mandate Palestine; smuggling Holocaust survivors across the Mediterranean; narrow escapes from premature death during the War of Independence; and a bohemian sojourn in New York.
It was in America, we learn, that he began his long marriage to Miranda, whom he snatched, as he guiltily recalls, from her country, her family, her religion, and all that she previously held dear. Guilt also attaches to his years of heavy drinking, and his poor record as a husband and a father. Luckily for him, love conquers all, as Miranda sits tirelessly beside his cot in intensive care.
There are few references to his career as a celebrated writer. But there is something far more interesting: an insight into the creative process itself, into the unmoored mind of a writer, a writer whose mind is spinning like a Magimix, full of great ingredients but - as yet - no recipe. We are witnesses to a work-in-progress that turns out to be the work itself.
Once in a while, Kaniuk does manage to press the stop button long enough to provide an uninterrupted narrative. Thus we learn why he is in Ichilov in the first place. Running low on hypertensives he visits Dr Szold, who writes a prescription but also proposes some routine blood work, which eventually leads him to Professor Zamir Halperin, Ichilov, and the revelation that he has cancer. An operation is a success but the patient is invaded by not one but two viruses, which transform him into the Lazarus-like figure, more dead than alive, who is the book's central consciousness.
Needless to say, he does eventually rise from the dead and return to his family home on Bilu Street, "to begin the rest of the days of my life". But it is not exactly a happy ending, as the epilogue spells out.
"And now," writes Kaniuk, "as an old man with cancer and a hernia and a destroyed belly, I leave you." Actually, he lived six more years, but the book stands as an heroic final act.
