Forgotten Night by Rebecca Goodman, and: Lilith Walks by Susan M. Schultz (review)

Abstract

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Reviewed by:

• Forgotten Night by Rebecca Goodman, and: Lilith Walks by Susan M. Schultz
• Leonard Schwartz (bio)

forgotten night
Rebecca Goodman
Spuyten Duyvil
https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/forgotten-night.html
300 pages; Print, $20.00 lilith walks
Susan M. Schultz
BlazeVOX
https://wp.blazevox.org/product/lilith-walks-by-susan-m-schultz/
108 pages; Print, $22.00

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Writing is both will and receptivity, design and chance, an assertion of the self and submission to a greater rhythm of language and of being. Rebecca Goodman's novel Forgotten Night emphasizes receptivity, even malleability, and an openness to these larger rhythms, even as its narrator, Jewish and self-estranged, seeks out precise answers to a personal question. The book follows her peregrinations through Alsatian French villages in search of hints about her grandfather's experiences there as a soldier during World War I, as well as in thrall to her Jewish ancestry amid antisemites of various epochs, from the Middle Ages to the Holocaust. Unlike Patrick Modiano in Dora Bruder, in which the first-person narrator meticulously tracks each bit of information he can find about Dora, a Jewish runaway teenager from the late 1930s, documenting the bureaucratic and epistemological moats that block his way sixty years after the fact, Goodman's narrator is absorbed into the psychogeography of each location. There is water, there is light, there are restaurants, there is wine, there is the chance of knowledge through osmosis. There is also the possibility of a total collapse of identity. It is as if history were experienced through the veil of dream, a dream that sometimes washes over and engulfs within itself the ostensibly waking narrator and reader.

Goodman's writing is both broken and supersaturated:

When I stepped back from the door, I looked up. Words rained all around me. At first a soft drizzle—conjunctions, words that seemed to connect but not describe. And, but, so—and I thought about those words that tried to connect. My childhood. My lined notebook. My awkward print. And then, softly, the words penetrating my clothes, my body. Adverbs, adjectives. Raining down on my skin, beneath my skin. Flowing through me. Disguising me. Revealing me. Forming the notion of who I was and who I could be. When [End Page 67] I looked around, I was ensconced in language—a language I could not understand—but feel. Words breaking apart mid-air. Fractured into letters, consonants, vowels. … Broken into images, sounds, birdcalls, wind. The water well. The stream. The walls surrounding the village. The silence around me. The landscape of my body. Of my history. Of the courtyard. Foreign—and yet near. Every word that fell on me marked with a closeness I could almost reach—an impenetrable distance that betrayed me. The distance between.

Throughout Forgotten Night, Goodman makes wondrous use of the sentence fragment, as in this passage. Sentence fragment permits a jagged particularity and a consistent brokenness to coexist, by which things rear up in momentary presence, and subjectivity is overwhelmed. Fragment functions musically as a mantra as well, productive of trance, as the text moves forward through a recurrence of images (one thinks of Duras's screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour). The story moves forward by way of male suggestion, though sometimes too through other female characters. As the narrator wanders the streets, carrying her grandfather's World War I diary, seeking out a Madame Brissac about whom her mother had saved a newspaper clipping, she meets a pair of smiling male artists, one in each section of the book, and a set of other women, all of whom nudge her further along into the search, the narrator's laconic haze notwithstanding. The sense is created that the work is being written from inside a female form that attracts male attention and demand as to what should happen next for her, even as the narrator is conscious of her own sense of aging and unattractiveness: a female persona that others wish to help or to seduce, and that manages to resist, but just barely. Writing is an openness to larger rhythms.

Also too, consciousness is non-self-identical. The narrator repeats that she is a...