FICTION
Elie Wiesel, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and author of the Holocaust memoir "Night," didn't make his task easy in his new novel, "A Mad Desire to Dance." Its protagonist, a European expatriate named Doriel Waldman, is ornery and unwilling to share much information about himself, and many readers may initially find him downright unlikable.
Perhaps even worse, the chapters in which he serves as a narrator are often dense and slow-moving, and Waldman poses more questions than some readers might be willing to entertain.
Consider: "If I could only unravel the web of dreams and phantasms that haunt me, disentangle time and duration in the consciousness of philosophers, the amused knowledge of psychologists, the lived experience of saints attracted by violence; might I be an epiphenomenon?"
The fact that Waldman may be insane (or possessed) doesn't make the reader's job easier, either.
So how does Wiesel manage to make the novel so engrossing?
The answer lies in the psychoanalyst whom Waldman grudgingly agrees to visit. Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt becomes our surrogate, reasoning patiently with Waldman and drawing his story out bit by bit as his trust in her grows.
In their first session, Waldman refuses to lie on the psychoanalyst's couch. Supine by the novel's end, he has revealed his childhood and his conflicted feelings about his parents, as well as describing affairs he claims to have enjoyed with a variety of women.
"I felt at home on her couch, looking up at her ceiling, drawing on images from my earliest childhood," Waldman admits near the novel's end.
The stories draw Waldman and Goldschmidt together, and watching their unlikely and appealing relationship develop is one of the novel's chief pleasures.
Compared with Waldman, Goldschmidt's hopes and worries are open to us readers, and her clear-headed, rational prose (revealed in her notes) is an appealing counterbalance to Waldman's convoluted and heady introspection.
"Your illness, in no way pathological, and not necessarily linked to memory, which is inevitably selective, comes from an impenetrable area that you call mystical," Goldschmidt tells her patient. "Persecuted by the gods, you flee from human beings. But when God is the enemy, I refuse to take part in the fight."
"A Mad Desire to Dance" often reads like a sonata for two instruments exploring their tonal differences. And it ends beautifully, with a shared note of unexpected hope.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.
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