A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - fiction / memoir

Curriculum Vitae

by
Yoel Hoffmann

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : odd but appealing

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Curriculum Vitae elevates Yoel Hoffmann’s penchant for mingling real and invented life to a new pitch, absorbing his entire life story into what masquerades as a novel. The seemingly random nature of his observations, oscillating over time and space, roughly parallels his personal chronology, sorting the events and feelings of his peripatetic career into brief, numbered segments, with which he toys and sometimes playfully disavows" - Michael Pinker, Review of Contemporary Fiction

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       Curriculum Vitae is a life-account -- of sorts. In 100 pieces and a number of line-drawing illustrations by the author, Hoffmann conveys impressions and stations of his life, as well as odd thoughts and observations (which are, in fact, often truly quite odd). This is far from straightforward autobiography, and yet it gives good insight into the author. Part of the book deals with his family's stay in Japan and his fascination with Japanese culture and language, and the zen-cultural influence is also reflected in the small bits of writing (and drawing).
       The author is at the center of much of the book, as 'I' or 'we' (or: "We (which is to say I)"), but there are also spots where Hoffmann admits:

     The little girl Sivan was there, and also Yoel Hoffmann, who eludes me continuously and whose nature is hard to grasp.

     A man looks at his life in the way one watches a silent movie. The mouth opens but nothing is heard .
     The movements are jumpy, here and there, because the memory film is interrupted by leaps, like quanta in physics.

It's all so self-evident why Joyce wrote, for some twenty years, a book without any real words in it. After all, one could die from clear-cut borders between one word and another: Pot. Skyscraper. File. Scandal. Dentures. Scabies. Snow. Old age. Flute. Cobalt. Socialism.

In memory of the people in the crematorium, we too are naked. Every time we take off our clothes our bodies are consecrated in their memory, like the parchment in the mezuzah.
     Likewise the books we've written are dedicated to them. One explicitly. One allusively. And the others secretly. There isn't a single page from which the smoke does not ascend.

- M.A.Orthofer, 1 July 2009

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Excerpt, with Translator's Note

• The Mookse and the Gripes
• Three Percent

• Yoel Hoffmann at the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

• Moods

• See Index of Israeli and Hebrew literature

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       Israeli author Yoel Hoffmann (יואל הופמן) was born in Romania in 1937.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2009-2021 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links