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Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory
by
Iddo Gefen
general information | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory |
| Author: | Iddo Gefen |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 2023 (Eng. 2025) |
| Length: | 273 pages |
| Original in: | Hebrew |
| Availability: | Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory - US |
| Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory - UK | |
| Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory - Canada | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
- Hebrew title: מפעל העננים של גברת לילנבלום
- Translated by Daniella Zamir
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Our Assessment:
B- : fun ideas but falls flat
See our review for fuller assessment.
The complete review's Review:
Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory is set largely in an out of the way locale in southern Israel, deep in the desert, hours away from Tel Aviv -- "basically the boondocks" --, called the Cliff.
Boaz Lilienblum runs a lodge there, with help from son Eli, who finished his stint in the army a year earlier and is still uncertain about what to do with his life.
The Cliff -- situated near an impressive crater -- does attract some tourists, notably those the locals call 'McMurphy tourists': "travelers who boarded planes and then traversed the country by bus in search of the tourist who had gone missing over a decade ago", Robert McMurphy.
Boaz's wife, Sarai -- the Mrs.Lilienblum of the title -- is a local school teacher (currently of robotics) who never finished her degree at Technion.
She is an inveterate tinkerer with her head somewhat in the clouds and the novel opens with her being found in the desert after she had been missing for three days.
A video surfaces from the time of her disappearance, showing her with what looks like a vacuum cleaner, hosing up sand which then forms a cloud over her head; she's apparently invented a way to transform sand into clouds.
The video attracts attention -- including that of potential investors, and soon enough a start-up is launched, Cloudies, backed also by the woman with the largest house in the Cliff, the apparently very wealthy widow Hannah Bialika (who also enlists Eli to help her dream ...).
Eli's sister, Naomi, had escaped the Cliff as soon as she was able to, going to a boarding school and then starting a successful career, but she returns to the Cliff when her mother goes missing, and then sticks around to help with the start-up.
The only person with much sense or understanding of business, her help is vital -- even as she also resorts to rather unscrupulous methods to keep the funding going.
It's Sarai, however, who is in charge -- though she has her own way of doing things.
As one visiting businessman tells her:
"I've been in the business world for forty years, Mrs. Lilienblum, and I've never seen a company run like this. With completely arbitrary departments that seem no more than suggestions, and employees without the slightest relevant qualifications or experience," he said sternly. "If we're being honest with ourselves, what we've seen here is mostly chaos." He fell silent, and Eli cast an anxious glance at his mother. "But our world was born out fo chaos, and after visiting here today, I'm beginning to understand why. To create something new, you must first tear down the old, and that is something, Mrs. Lilienblum, you seem to know how to do better than any of us."Making clouds out of sand is impressive, but the real payoff can only come if the clouds also produce rain, which they don't at first. With the novel presented in parts that promise a countdown to rain -- "153 Days Till Rain", etc. -- the story certainly seems to be moving in that direction, a deadline eventually set with a big investor -- "Ben Gould, billionaire extraordinaire", who is: "one of the most famous people in the tech industry" -- announcing he was coming to check out the invention in person. He had already tweeted, upon seeing the video, that if it can bring down rain: "I'll make an offer. No lower than twenty million". The novel builds to that visit, and culminates in the demonstration that Cloudies puts on, which goes ... reasonably well, for a while, if not entirely as hoped for.
Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory is an odd novel, with an intriguing fantastical premise -- the cloud-making-machine -- as well as a variety of other promising odds and ends, from the peculiar design of the local houses, thanks to the Swiss architect, Morgensetein, behind them (each with unique 'Morgenstein alcoves', hidden spaces that often went undetected for years) to the unusual but headstrong women Sarai and Hannah Bialika to what grows into a rather extensive e-mail con. The four members of the Lilienblum-family are the central characters, but others, from the local council head to various tourists also play significant roles.
Gefen remains very fuzzy about the scientific/technological details about Sarai's invention-- and has his characters similarly fuzzy about them, including Sarai herself, as she has difficulty scaling up the device, much less explaining (or, apparently, understanding) how it works. (Ridiculously, essential functions are apparently unique to the exact model of red vacuum cleaner Sarai adapted; among the novel's sillier details is the idea that: "Even a slight change in the plastic's color caused the machine to malfunction".) Beyond that, it's hard to believe that an invention with this potential would attract so little investor interest and there would only be a mere twenty million dollar offer on the table; in the investment and VC climate of the past few decades, surely potential investors would have been falling all over themselves to get a piece of this (even more so then after the big demonstration, despite it not going as planned). Gefen plays with a much too big idea here -- and without letting it play to its size -- to fit in the quaint small-time backwater story he wants to tell.
There are a lot of fun little ideas in the novel; indeed, a lot of the pieces sound fairly clever and good, from the McMurphy angle to the peculiarities of the Cliff (both the community and its houses) to the cloud-making-machine (fantastical though that idea may be). It all seems so richly imagined -- and yet the overall feeling of the book is of a failing of imagination, with the pieces fit and placed all too obviously and simply. The detailed outline of the novel must have sounded pretty good, but in the telling -- despite the fact that Gefen writes agreeably enough -- it's disappointing.
Part of the reason for that is also that Gefen seems unsure where to focus the story. Despite the significance of the cloud-making invention, it doesn't dominate the novel as much as one might expect; Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory is a very busy novel -- including busying itself with quite a few peripheral storylines and characters (which, yes, all play one or another role in the larger story ...). As far as the characters go, Eli seems to be the primary one, but Gefen can't quite go all-in on making him the truly central protagonist -- but then doesn't present the others, notably the other family members, nearly fully enough either. The resolution has each of the Lilienblums more or less find their way, but feels like an all-too-neat tying things up, the various characters shoved (rather abruptly) into their little boxes.
Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory has all the elements of a 'charming', 'quirky' little family-novel, with a 'fun' fantasy element (the cloud-making-invention), and Gefen's writing is reasonably solid and skillful, but as whole the novel falls flat.
- M.A.Orthofer, 28 March 2025
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Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory:
- Astra House publicity page
- כנרת זמורה דביר publicity page
- The Deborah Harris Agency information page
- See Index of Israeli and Hebrew literature
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Israeli author Iddo Gefen (עידו גפן) was born in 1992.
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© 2025 the complete review
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