I heard the leading Israeli writer David Grossman interviewed on Radio 4 Front Row recently [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03vh0cz], ahead of his appearance at the Jewish Book Week last week.

Grossman’s son was killed while in the Israeli defence forces in 2006. In 2012 he published his response to the tragedy, Falling out of Time, which has now been translated into English.

Falling out of Time appears to defy genre classification, and has been variously described as prose/theatre/poetry/radio play, as well as an oratorio without music. It tells the story of bereaved parents as they set out to reach their lost children.

Grossman believes that the book wrote itself. Within that process, he felt as if he had no control over what he wrote.

When asked about the uncompleted sentences within the text, Grossman responds that the book arose from a world where rules had been lost. In the face of tragedy, language itself fails. Falling out of Time was an attempt to find words for the unspeakable. For Grossman, writing this novel was his way of making the effort, and of refusing to avoid the tragedy that had engulfed him and his family.

‘I can’t understand anything unless I write it.’ While the undertaking of writing the book was not in itself therapeutic, and nor did it help him understand the death and loss of his son, Grossman did see it as a way of returning, the processes of writing, imagining, fantasising, all contributing to a ‘being in this life’.

For Grossman too, the book is about more than his personal tragedy, and extends beyond the loss of a loved one. In that sense, Falling out of Time speaks to the universal and existential experience of the mystery of life and death coexisting.

CQ