Heir to the Glimmering World : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: ...the sweetness + satsifaction of a good storyteller...
Review: Cynthia Ozick emblishes, strips, toys, teases, manipulates, releases words, thoughts + concepts in this highly satisfying read. The author has taken an exquisite subset of the universe of words; glistening silk threads woven together to tell a multi-layered tale of various outsiders. USA in 1935 and yet to the Ozick's characters, the world around them hardly exists...until the shadow of Nazi Germany creeps in at the very end + then it is only a casual reference.

As if in a fairy-tale, The Mitwissers (meaning "tag-alongs" in German) cling to their very own teddy bear, James and nurse-maid, personal assistant Rosie to negotiate the new world. At times, the novel reads like a whirlwind of retellings. Ozick slyly toying with magical realism. Part mystery, two narrators lure the reader in. Merrily immersed in this stellar novel, it is clear that the reader is the heir to the glimmering world!

Rating:
Summary: Potential Pulitzer winner
Review: Cynthia Ozick has written a great book, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it won the Pulitzer Prize this year. (And no, I am not related to her, nor have I ever met her!)
The story is original and well-written. Some samples of Ozick's writing: When talking about displaced European professors, she says "the rest, in their broken dignity, dragging their medals and degrees, drooped toward whatever uncertain welcome they might find in institutions north or west or south" (p.58) Another example: "The snow "blew down hour after hour, as if some bloated invisible sky-bound stomach was spewing it out" (p.122).
The best part is it's not great writing simply for great writing's sake -- she uses it to tell a memorable story.

Rating:
Summary: Outshines the vast majority of novels out there
Review: Heir To The Glimmering World will not be to all readers tastes, of that I am confident. Some will find it too erudite, for others the pacing too slow, and many will be frustrated by the healthy dose of German idiom spread throughout the story. If however you are reader that appreciates exquisitely written prose, and masterful character study, you have found your novel.

Rating:
Summary: Deserves to be a best seller
Review: I am new to Ozick's books and find myself astounded that such a wonderful writer exists about whom I have never heard anything before! Other reviewers have discussed the plot, so let me just say thank you to Ms. Ozick for writing this marvelous story. I kept expecting it to go into magical realism, but everything in the story was realistic -- yet somehow still magical. After reading this book, I immediately headed for the library to check out her other books. This author is a national treasure!

Rating:
Summary: Apparent "Heir"
Review: I found this novel difficult to put down, even if at times Cynthia Ozick seems to be repeating herself, letting her narrative focus stray from one character to another. "Heir" is a mix of pre-World War II angst and lives truncated by obsession. A young woman comes into the employ of a 1930s German refugee family who are being supported by a mysterious and peculiar benefactor. Coincidences abound as the novel moves toward its bittersweet but satisfying conclusion. You need to stay with it, but you'll be fascinated by the details of upstate New York and the Bronx as well as glimpses of prewar Germany. I was left wondering what happened to these characters, particularly to the children and to Rose. Certainly their fates were better than the benefactor's or the gigantic scholar's -- and couldn't the scholar get a job teaching at a rabinnical school? The fact that he has more options than he gives himself kept nagging at me. But perhaps his fate was sealed in this godless new world the Mitwissers find themselves in.

Rating:
Summary: Rich and rewarding on many levels
Review: Ozick's many-layered novel, set in 1935, is built on contradictions, beginning with her choice of narrator. A formidable intellectual and brilliant writer whose essays and novels have received numerous international awards, Ozick tells her story in the voice of Rose, a naïve, lonely 18-year-old of haphazard education in upstate New York. The novel has the dramatic structure of Dickens and the Brontes, the Victorian writers Rose loves, but its thematic milieu is wholly modern, exploring the clash of European intellectualism and American materialism, and the incomprehensible evil and upheaval of Nazism.

"Frau Mitwisser led me into a tiny parlor so dark that it took some time before her face, small and timid as a vole's, glimmered into focus."

Rose, from a future, matured vantage point, opens her narrative with this day. On her own at 18, she has answered an ad in the Albany paper for some amorphous position with this German-Jewish refugee family. Her parents are dead, her mother long ago, her father recently, and her cousin Bertram (her first, and unrequited, love) is about to abandon her for a radical communist, Ninel.

Taking refuge among the family of refugees, Rose remains isolated. Professor Mitwisser is a scholar and a larger-than-life figure, at least at first: "I was conscious of a force, of a man accustomed to dictating his conditions." Mrs. Mitwisser, too, was once a woman of standing; a scientist who worked with Schrödinger, though she got no credit for his Nobel Prize, despite her contribution. Now, unhinged by events, she keeps to her bed, neglecting her children. The three boys are interchangeable hellions, the baby, Waltraut, is largely ignored, and the eldest daughter, Anneliese, is bossy and aloof.

The Mitwissers were rescued by Quakers who found the professor a position teaching about an obscure Christian sect, the Charismites. But the professor's field is not the Charismites but the Karaites, an obscure, heretic Jewish sect that held to a literal interpretation of the Bible. It is some time before Rose understands that in Europe "they had esteemed him because no one knew what he knew. And here - now - he was scorned for the same reason: no one knew what he knew."

In an irony that will be missed by many readers since Ozick does not allude to it even though her narrator is recalling these events years later, the Karaites were spared by Hitler who decided that their heresy made them non-Jews. Some even participated in the Holocaust.

Rose, of course, has never heard of the Karaites (or the Charismites). Her first task is to box up the professor's library because a mysterious benefactor has rescued them from Albany and arranged for a move to New York so the professor can continue his scholarship at the city's library.

The books are in German and Hebrew, so Rose, ignorant of both languages, boxes them in the most efficient way - by size. The professor, outraged (" `This is how an intelligent creature organizes scholarship? By how tall and how short?'"), assigns (or, rather, orders Anneliese to assign) a simpler task - caring for the baby.

By the time the family has moved to New York - only it's not New York; it's the Bronx and the weedy outskirts at that - Rose is also caring for Mrs. Mitwisser and typing for the professor in the evening. She suspects Mrs. Mitwisser might not be "truly mad," but instead answering "disorder with disorder, fracture with fracture," and prides herself on finding a palliative - Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility." "Mrs. Mitwisser understood all of this very well; it glimmered with unfamiliar familiarity; none of it was beyond her comprehension." And when the Dashwoods' fortunes fell, "she warmed to the affinities she instantly felt: the loss of money, the necessity of money, the hope of money; standing expectation, repute."

But in the next chapter Mrs. Mitwisser has ripped the book to shreds. The mysterious benefactor, James, has arrived, showering the family with presents, filling the house with laughter. Only Mrs. Mitwisser hates him and fears his corrupting influence. Even little, bewildered Waltraut blossoms in his presence, basking in unaccustomed attention.

But Rose, too, has doubts. James tipples whiskey in his teacup and usurps her place in the study. The gleaming new typewriter he bought sits in a closet. Yes, he has paid her salary, but she has little use for money.

She misses those steamy summer nights in the professor's study, where "little by little his cause was revealed to me. Boiling rebellion was Mitwisser's subject. He was drawn to schismatics, fiery heretics, apostates - the lunatics of history." But after James' arrival, Rose begins to see something of George Eliot's Casaubon in the professor. Is he striving mightily and achieving little? Only pretending to strive? Does his life's work amount to anything?

James A'Bair is himself a puzzle. He is the Bear Boy, subject of picture books his father so famously and lucratively created. He hates the books that usurped his childhood, hates the money he so lavishly bestows on others. But why has he chosen the Mitwissers? Does he admire the Professor's scholarship or the family's cohesion? Does he sympathize with their plight or desire to corrupt them, as Mrs. Mitwisser believes?

These questions, and many more, are raised and some even answered in the course of this eventful novel. I haven't even touched on Rose's inheritance of the first Bear Boy book or the return of Bertram into Rose's life, or done justice to Anneliese whose self-possession conceals so much. But the narrative takes a couple jogs sideways to provide some needed explication of James. Several third person sections, told from his viewpoint, jar a bit. Isn't this Rose's story, written in reflection? Then are the James digressions her own invention; her explanation for events? If not, how did they come to be?

Quibbles aside, this is a rich, deep, lovely book, full of story and thought, layers of meaning and ache and cruelty and love. Selfishness and manipulation prove sometimes beneficial, but self-deception is always a mistake. It's a book that can be read on many levels, all rewarding.

Rating:
Summary: Dazzled but heart and mind left cold
Review: Sorry. Heir doesn't cut it. Yes, the writing is brilliant -- the sentences are to swoon for, and some of her theories and casual throw away throughts are really stupendous. The plot had me going too. But for me, her people aren't real. I'm always kept at a distance from her characters in such a subtle way I'm hardly aware of it. Her cast is so extravagant and outrageous and larger than life, I get fooled into sensation, but never into pure feeling, which is the main reason I like to read. I never ache for them or care about them, though at first I thought I would, particularly Rosie and Bertram. But that duo fizzles out pretty soon, and when Bertram reappears toward the end, Rosie never even refers to her old crush. Annelise comes on board as a strong, full-bodied character, then dissipates into school girl crush blankness. Ninel (Lenin backwards, oy, how precious), Mr. and Mrs. Mitwesser - they all are written loudly and exuberantly, but there's no humanity there. It feels sacrilegious saying this about such an awesome and assured writer as Ms. Ozick, but that's how it is. It seems that ideas mean more than her characters, but what are the ideas in the end? I am spun around here and there --lots of flashy shows of genius and cleverness and scholarship, but what is she getting at? I am awed and humbled at the dazzling display of literary skill, and I am dazzled too, but never into feeling, and in the end, not into apprehending a glimmering world either.



Rating:
Summary: For Erudite Readers
Review: This novel is definitely for readers who have appreciation for a literary and intellectual writer. I am a fluffhead, and I like good stories, tight plotting, compelling characters, and a brisk pace. This story was painfully meandering, overstuffed with verbal acrobatics, with a hermetic and melancholic atmosphere - like an overpopulated Anita Brookner novel. I bought this book after reading Cynthia Ozick's witty account of her author tour in the Times Book Review, and I admire her writing style, but the writing substance fails to capture my interest.

Rating:
Summary: More hype than substance
Review: This was a long book about very little. The reader is expected to take a great deal on faith: the Bear Boy's neurosis, the mother's virtual psychosis, the family that lives in an improbable world of coincidence and luck. I have read other books by Ozick, most of which were masterful (The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers, numerous short stories) but this book left me irritated. I couldn't stop reading it but it wished I had. The whole Karaite theme seemed almost irrelevant,although much had been made of Prof. Mitwisser's devotion to an extinct Jewish sect that denied interpretation of the Torah. Sadly, all I can say is, Big Deal.

Rating:
Summary: Thrilling and keenly inventive
Review: While in concept they may sound dull and dry, novels about research --- like A.S. Byatt's POSSESSION or Michael Frayn's HEADLONG --- often have the pace and tension of a good detective thriller. They present a central mystery that the protagonist must solve and promise a resolution before the final page. But Cynthia Ozick's new book, HEIR TO THE GLIMMERING WORLD, is a research novel without a clear motivating quest, the lack of which is its point. For these characters, such scholastic questing proves ominously futile.

When she begins working for Professor Mitwisser, a German academic who has relocated his family to New York State in the 1930s, Rosie Meadows, who narrates HEIR TO THE GLIMMERING WORLD, has neither a clear description of her responsibilities nor any knowledge whatsoever of Mitwisser's field. His shoulders permanently hunched and brow perpetually furrowed in deep concentration, Mitwisser is a scholar of the Karaites, an obscure sect of Judaism whose followers decried any interpretation of the Bible and instead favored a strictly literal reading. Actually, Mitwisser is the scholar of the Karaites: he is "an archive; a repository of centuries; a courier of alphabets and histories. At home, before they threw him out, they had esteemed him because not one knew what he knew. And here --- now --- he was scorned for the same reason: no one knew what he knew."

At first Mitwisser has no use for Rosie, working instead with his daughter Anneliese for long hours in his study and leaving Rosie to watch over the rest of the household, including three rambunctious boys, a withdrawn four-year-old daughter named Waltraut, and the demented Mrs. Mitwisser. While she plays many different roles for the different family members --- nurse, maid, secretary, nemesis --- Rosie connects with none of the Mitwissers and remains alone in the crowded house, an observer of its domestic politics, but rarely a participant.

Of all the family, it is Mrs. Mitwisser who proves the most unpredictable of the bunch: a former physicist with the Wilhelm Reich Institute in Berlin, she is prone to prolonged fits wherein she rips at her nightgown, cuts herself with pieces of mirror, takes scissors to books and pillows, and steals money from Rosie. "She had sunk into an ongoing strangeness," Rosie observes, "something deeper than lethargy, and more perplexing." Presumably, Mrs. Mitwisser is unhappy in America, where she believes her family lives in shame to their benefactor, a young, privileged, "Godless" American named James, whose fortune derives from his father's popular children's books.

Even when Rosie finally begins working directly with Professor Mitwisser on the Karaites, Ozick keeps their scholarship purposefully vague --- glimpsed from her narrator's limited point of view rather than from Mitwisser's deeply knowledgeable position. Instead, Ozick treats her characters as her subjects and presents them as mysteries to be delved into and solved. As the novel progresses, Ozick explores Mrs. Mitwisser's early career working with Erwin Schrödinger and James's tenuous relationship with his father and attempts to outrun his family's legacy. In prose that is keenly inventive and intuitive, Ozick makes this investigation as riveting in its own way as any thriller, ultimately evoking the burden of history --- "how heavy it was to be who they were."

Ozick's is an unglamorous view of the lonely, thankless world of scholarship, whose inhabitants toil over obscure figures that barely puncture the popular consciousness. In this way, HEIR TO THE GLIMMERING WORLD offers a much-needed corrective to THE DA VINCI CODE, whose academic hokum seems injurious to dedicated scholars. The study of the Karaites holds no global conspiracies, no cloak-and-dagger clues. Ozick's triumph lies in how far she asserts the futility of Mitwisser's scholastic obsession while simultaneously locating the importance of such work.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner