m > m ci m ci P < ci m H Q ci under highly dramatic circumstances. Meanwhile, the rich and famous make their way throughheavy seas toward a questionable destination. Beneath them: the crew, thekitchen staff and cleaning ladies, and the four African stowaways. Moster, who is a highly regarded translator, ties thisall together intoan impres sive debut novel AndrewWilliams Ludwig-Maximilim isUniversit ?t, Munich Arnos Oz. Rhyming Life and Death. Nicholas De Lange, tr. Boston / New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009. 117 pages. $23. isbn978-0-15-101367-8 Amos Oz's Rhyming Life and Death brims with tantalizing thoughts on life and death evoked by those eternal questions and answers, the "great cycle." Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, prepares one for the latest book's preoccupations. Democritus denied the arbitrari ness ofphenomena that was implied by the free actions of the gods. He replaced that explanation with the idea of deterministic laws governing the behavior of atoms and, as a con sequence, explaining all phenomena made of atoms, including human beings and their actions. "Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason, by necessity." All the events in the world now are con nected in an eternal, deterministic, causal chain with a single possible future, one that would loop back and repeat itself in a "cosmic great cycle." Rhyming Life and Death follows in itsmetatext thedictum thatEpi curus postulated centuries later: that it isbetter to follow the myths of the gods than tobe a slave to the "fate" of thephysicists; forthe formersug gests a hope of forgiveness, in return for honor, whereas the latter has an ineluctable necessity. We can ask primal questions, but we can never stand near the beginning?the ques tions and their answers are deter mined by thehistorical tradition in which we findourselves. And truths are apprehended from our stance within history. So what is theSelf?What is the Mind? What is a Writer? What is theReality depicted by theWriter? Does realitydepend on us? Science tells us that subatomic particles have wave functions yet actually have no existence unless someone views them. Furthermore, they argue, we are dealing with just another sub jective interpretation.Our "will to believe" in our cultural concepts forms our mythology, our specific reality, our episteme. Man uses his knowledge, storytelling, as means of escaping an alienated world to a state of deliverance. Just like the particle waves, we have existence only as "willing machines." Rhyming Life and Death is also a will toward meaning, a search for an original state of perfection, fan tasized or real, that is unattainable, as thisbook exemplifies. There isno escape from the world, our means of redemption and deliverance. Amos Oz asks the same questions: "The Author used to sit alone at night in an abandoned storeroom where he poured out fragments of muddled stories onto paper. He wrote more or less the same way as he dreamed. And in those days he also had an insatiable curiosity to try and under stand why people hurt each other and themselves, without meaning to at all. . . .And yet he continues to watch them and write about them so as to touch them without touching, and so that they touch him without really touching him. One could put it like this:he writes about them as ifhe were a photographer from the Rh y wing Life& Death days of sepia photographs, taking a group portrait." "Why write about things that exist without you?" Oz continues. "Why describe inwords things that are not words? . . .You cannot write without looking behind you; like Lot's wife. And in doing so you turn yourself and them into blocks of salt." Again, Oz asks: "But what was theAuthor tryingto say?" Amos Oz is well aware of Diogenes' quote: "By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void." Dalia Daniel Stanford University Naum Prifti.Grinding of the Soul. W?? Rafaela Kondi,ed. Peter Prifti, tr.BoulW ?? der, Colorado. East European Mono- &Bli graphs (Columbia University Press, f?5i distr.). 2009. 306 pages. $55. isbn978 0-88033-641-3 ^8 Grinding of theSoul is the first work W?? published in theU.S. byNaum Prifti, WBm a prolificwriter of short stories,chilllSi dren's books, novels, screenplays, W??i and television scripts.This collection 11111 of sixteen stories and a novella boasts workmanlike prose largely bare of 11111 III i ll Li odaillyIIII I tili I M I IIIiI i I I i II l II t l 1filiI IIil Iii1i 7o i World Literature Today ...