Book Review: "The Magician of Lublin" by Isaac Bashevis Singer

As you can tell, I have gotten back into reading Isaac Bashevis Singer lately and honestly, I am really enjoying myself. His books are very deep and mystical with powerful, engaging and very human storylines. This one in particular is about a magician named Yasha who lives his life in 'sin' [as some characters reflect]. He has a wife, but he is unfaithful. He has a grounding, but he seeks fame and fortune. He has these deep philosophical interjections about who he will be when he dies and there are these large descriptions of the sun, moon and stars that almost belittle Yasha in the bigger, everlasting space of the universe. Yasha is a flawed man yes, but he is also hopeful, passionate and he performs magic ironically in his personal life by deceiving others he cares about. You may grow to like the character, but you do not respect him. You may grow to understand the character, but you will never figure him out. Yasha, by the end of the book, is still a mystery and an enigma. He is a puzzle and yet, his narrative has already been solved.

When I was reading this book, the first thing I noticed was the classic mystical writing style of the philosophies of life and death, something that Isaac Bashevis Singer does so well you will not even notice that you too, are becoming existential, staring up into the stars. I noticed these deep waves of landscape descriptions, the weather and the cosmos. He writes like a painter, there is always a subject to the flowery colours of his art. There is always something else hidden there. And as we stare up to the skies with Yasha and think about who we will be when we die, we get to also cover some of my favourite quotations from the book. Just have a look at this brilliance of writing style, the sheer control is amazing and other-worldly in passion:

"For quite some time now Yasha had been involved in this very dilemma. It disturbed him day and night. Of course he had always been a soul-searcher, prone to fantasy and strange conjecture, but since the advent of Emilia, his mind was never quiet. He had evolved into a regular philosopher. Now instead of swallowing his beer, he rolled the bitterness around on his tongue, gums and palate..."

Everything about Yasha's very existence that has changed because of Emilia seems to be reduced to the way he drinks his beer. It is a brilliantly complex quotation, using this simplicity to show vast and unbridled variation in lifestyle. It is a trademark of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

"The dusk descended. Beyond the city there was still some light, but among the narrow streets and high buildings it was already dark. In the shops, oil candles were lit. Bearded Jews, dressed in long cloaks and wearing wide boots, moved through the streets on their way to evening prayers. A new moon arose, the moon of the month of Sivan. There were still puddles in the streets, vestiges of the spring rains, even though the sun had been blazing down on the city all day..."

Now, this may seem like a trivial quotation but I promise you, it is not so. Isaac Bashevis Singer is also known for completely slowing down time to the very narrowest of margins. Here we see, stage by stage, the city getting dark as night approaches. It is even slower than actual time itself as we are made to feel as if we are going in slow-motion as the city moves from sundown, to late evening to nighttime, then to midnight.

"Though Yasha, like his father and grandfather, had been born here, he remained a stranger - not simply because he had cast of his Jewishness but because he was always a stranger, here and in Warsaw, amongst Jews as well as Gentiles. They were all settles, domesticated - while he kept moving. They had children and grandchildren; there were none for him. They had their God, their saints, their leaders - he had only doubt. Death meant Paradise to them, but to him only dread. What came after life? Was there such thing as a soul? And what happened to it after it left the body?..."

Isaac Bashevis Singer's switching from narrating the story in third person omniscient to narrating in third person limited and then, switching to a combination of first and third person is brilliance and perfection rolled into one. We are invited into the thoughts of Yasha at this particular time as he reflects on the way he has lived apart from everyone else and honestly, it is one of the best passages in the book to me.

"In the middle of the night it suddenly grew warm as if a nocturnal sun had begun to shine. The moon was overcast. The sky writhed with clouds. All at once thunder and lightning began. In a flash of light the field were illuminated as far as the horizon..."

The sheer simplicity and complexity of the quotations regarding the weather both slow down and speed up the feeling of time. The first quotation slows it down to slow-motion and this quotation here speeds it up to the point where everything seems to be happening at once. It is Isaac Bashevis Singer's pure control that does this and it is just the most amazing thing about his writing that I have witnessed.

In conclusion, his writing is pure brilliance, as I have said so many times here and honestly, you have to read this book and all of his others to really understand how he grabs you by the collars of your shirt and drags you into his world of absolute, unbridled mysticism.