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Title: The Book of Daniel: A Novel by E. L. Doctorow ISBN: 0-452-27566-0 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (20 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A brilliant meditation on the Rosenbergs
Comment: I first read this book in the early 1980s, shortly after reading Doctorow's other masterpiece, Ragtime. The Book of Daniel is a fictional meditation based on the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. The Isaacsons, Doctorow's fictional couple based on the Rosenbergs, have a young son named Daniel and a daughter named Susan, and the book is told from the point of view of Daniel, now grown and attending college during the radical upheavals of the 1960s.
Doctorow displays an encyclopedic and detailed knowledge of both of those political periods, capturing the tone of the rhetoric, the pop music, the posters, the idealism, the hypocrisy, and the dilemmas confronting human beings caught up in political movements that seem more powerful than the people themselves. He is as unsparing in his treatment of sixties radicals as he is in his treatment of the cold government executioners who sent the Rosenbergs to their death.
One of most remarkable things about this book is the character of Daniel himself: sharply intelligent yet confused and conflicted, someone who sees all the angles yet cannot bring himself to act -- a modern-day Hamlet. The title's allusion to the biblical Daniel is reflected throughout the text in a number of clever ways as the narrative leaps between historical reflections, allegories, and vivid evocations of moments and events in the life of Daniel, his sister, and their families. It poignantly evokes the relationship between the two children and the various guardians who are assigned to care for them after society has arrested and executed their parents.
The other remarkable thing about this book is its use of language. Doctorow is a great prose stylist. To get an idea of how great he is, you should read both this book and Ragtime, which is a very different work. Ragtime is written in a style reminiscent of an old children's primer--simple, quaint sentences, gentle imagery. The Book of Daniel, by contrast, is full of incendiary language and is a very complex narrative full of jarring transitions -- language ideal, in other words, to capturing the feel of the political periods and events that are the subject of the book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Bugs Bunny, totalitarian
Comment: This is the first book I've read from E.L. Doctorow. His style is initially disconcerting because it isn't tethered to a linear structure. Time can't progress without folding in on itself. Even sentences are often interrupted and excised of all punctuation. Perspectives shift between first and third person -- which a previous reviewer noted can be confusing. Yet the book is so saturated in details, the characters display so many nuanced shades of anger and pride and cruelty and love, that it brings the book to a level that everyone can understand. The people in this book are such smart asses, all of them! Daniel's grandmother, the black man in his basement, the pathetic palsied Mindish who we're never quite permitted to hate. In that sense "Daniel" is a politically sophisticated work in that it acknowledges politics and government as flawed and limited structures created by flawed and limited people (like sentences). Daniel observes that his sister died by a lack of analysis. It's evident that an abundance of such is how he hopes to keep living. I left the book feeling like I was cheating myself by not having a mind as active and relentless as Daniel's. I'm grateful for this book. And I'm sort of glad it isn't very popular. Seems to confirm its authenticity.
Rating: 4
Summary: memories past and present
Comment: Doctorow's compelling novel of revolutionary reminiscence is rendered through the loosely chained memories of its narrator, Daniel Issacson. Daniel recalls his parents, dignified and honest Marxist idealists seeking a way out of what they perceived, maybe rightfully so, as capitalist hegemony. Daniel's parents, Paul and Rochelle, are eventually betrayed by a fellow idealist(and dentist) who turns them in to save his own neck from federal investigators swimming in the mania of McCarthy-era extremism. His parents are honest in their ideals, never seeking revolution as a means to create anarchism, or any nefarious plots to create disorder out of unjust order.
The narrative style of the novel is particularly noteworthy. The plot of the book is a finely woven quilt recalling the history of a mysterious leftist underbelly of America in the middle of the twentieth century, admirably portrayed by its personifications in Paul and Rochelle. Daniel, the oldest of two children, is a graduate student at Columbia. He is tormented by the cloudy, romantic, and tender memories of his parents; even more so is his sister, Susan, who is intermittently hospitalized in many asylums, never having been able to overcome the incarceration and execution of her innocently martyred parents. Revolutionary sentiment and action are cast in reverie in the Book of Daniel. However, the reverie turns nightmarish in the blink of an eye. Never can genuine, spirited opposition to exploitation, as poetically embodied in Paul and Rochelle, ever be fully suppressed, since the human will always strives toward justice, no matter how twisted the manifestations seem to others around us. Remember Rochelle's execution: The electric chair failed to kill her the first time; it had to be reactivated. "The renunciation of resistance is the ratification of regression." - Theodor Adorno
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Title: Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America by Marjorie B. Garber, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Marjorie Garber ISBN: 0415911206 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 July, 1995 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
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Title: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow ISBN: 0452279070 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: City of God: A Novel by E. L. Doctorow ISBN: 0452282098 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 30 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Welcome to Hard Times by E. L. Doctorow ISBN: 0452275717 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg ISBN: 0872860175 Publisher: City Lights Publishers Pub. Date: 01 June, 1956 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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