JANUARY 2018 - AudioFile
The word “herculean” best describes the struggle of narrator Paul Boehmer as he brings to life the colorful characters in this expansive and immersive novel. The featured character is New York University academic Andrew Cohen, whose nearly perfect life is coming apart as a result of a series of religious-based hallucinations. Boehmer affects an authoritative tone as he paints vivid images of contemporary New York City. He refuses to let excessive description and long sequences of seemingly useless information bog him down as he aids the author’s exploration of intellectual Jewish-American life at the turn of the 21st century. For a novel that is at times complicated and exasperating, Boehmer uses his premier vocal abilities and unmistakable intellect to “thread the needle” to an ultimately satisfying conclusion. R.O. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
09/25/2017
In Namdar’s disappointing debut, Andrew Cohen, an NYU professor and formerly prolific writer, has a long, slow, incredibly banal mid-life crisis. Stretched out over the year leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Cohen wallows in self-pity, ambling toward a breakdown that reads more like a man grasping at his waning privilege than a human being fearful in the face of mortality. Although Cohen left his ex-wife and daughters decades ago, when the girls were little, only now does he realize how absent they are from his life. Vulnerable for perhaps the first time, he’s haunted by his abandonment of them and yet can’t seem to bring himself to take responsibility. Otherwise, Cohen goes on to suffer from dwindling sexual mojo, writer’s block, and nightmares. He feels suffocated by his beautiful, decades-younger girlfriend (a former student) and doesn’t understand why he isn’t awarded a promotion he’d been expecting. Perhaps because of the unrelenting internal narration, the book remains plotless. Cohen falls asleep, has anxiety attacks, stays awake, rushes into taxis, eats or forgets to eat, and finds himself bewildered by his own dysfunction. In prose as tedious as Cohen’s misery, Namdar tries to underscore the significance of his narrator’s collapse by cataloguing every hour of every day. But Cohen remains the jerk he’s always been, and the reader is left wishing he would see what they do—that his self-absorption only intensifies, rather than dissipates, against the forthcoming tragedy of actual human suffering looming on the horizon. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
Namdar redefines what it means to tell a Jewish story... The originality and power of this idea [of Jewishness], along with Namdar’s fertile power of observation and evocation, make The Ruined House a new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read.” — Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine
“Poetic...ambitious…a novel to be reread, for its layers of meaning and symbolism, noise and silence, mystical resonances and lyrical passages. [Namdar’s] writing, in its deep and close observations, is prayerful.” — Sandee Brawarsky, Jewish Week
“A wildly original novel about the mental, physical and spiritual undoing of an arrogant college professor—a secular Jew living in elitist New York on the eve of 9/11. Unsettling and beautifully written, Namdar captures the seduction of an ancient religion as the world begins to crack.” — Newsweek, The 50 Coolest Books to Read This Summer: 2018’s Best Fiction and Non-Fiction (So Far)
“Artfully translated ...An imaginative and visionary work about one man’s spectacular mid-life crisis, framed by sacred texts and filled with poetic and portentous passages. Reminiscent of the work of Nicole Krauss.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“The Ruined House is a fascinating novel about the overwhelming presence of myth and historical trauma in our lives. A cross between Saul Bellow’s disintegrating intellectuals and Bulgakov’s mystical revelations, this is a fiercely inventive novel.” — Amos Oz
“Exhilarating..a masterpiece of modern religious literature, exactly as deep, disturbing and unresolved as is necessary to remind us, habituated as we are to the shallows of contemporary Jewish life, what still lurks beneath — primitive, raw and exacting.” — New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice
“Beautifully written and will absorb all your attention in first few minutes as you start reading it.” — Washington Book Review, Best Books of the Fall
“The Ruined House, which won Israel’s biggest literary award (the Sapir Prize), is a fascinatingly claustrophobic year inside Andrew’s [the main character’s] mind…. A meditation on the isolation of the modern age, when one can live among millions of people in a vibrant city, yet still be utterly alone.” — BookPage
“With richly poetic prose, Ruby Namdar portrays a man who leads a successful, comfortable secular life—until he finds himself haunted by religious visions. The Ruined House is shocking, insightful, and deeply disturbing.” — Lauren Belfer, New York Times bestselling author of And After the Fire, recipient of the National Jewish Book Award
“Above all, The Ruined House is a keenly observed meditation on the failing inner resources of American Jewry at the dawn of the 21st century.” — Mosaic Magazine
“Beautifully written and will absorb all your attention in first few minutes as you start reading it.” — Washington Book Review
“Namdar’s artistic prose is imprinted on every page as he explores age-old recurring themes: sin, expiation, ruin and renewal. “The Ruined House” should not be read casually because the story presents thought-provoking perspectives of time-honored traditions and their place in today’s world.” — The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
“Namdar’s excellent writing (for which Halkin must also be recognized), acute observational commentary, and fluency in Jewish religious texts make this novel a towering achievement of contemporary Jewish literature.” — Jewish Book Council
“Namdar may have written the Jewish- American novel for our time. It’s both disturbing and hypnotic, definitely one of the best novels of the year.” — Jewish Herald-Voice
“Ambitious, multidimensional, and beautifully written.” — New York Journal of Books
New York Times Book Review
Exhilarating..a masterpiece of modern religious literature, exactly as deep, disturbing and unresolved as is necessary to remind us, habituated as we are to the shallows of contemporary Jewish life, what still lurks beneath — primitive, raw and exacting.
Amos Oz
The Ruined House is a fascinating novel about the overwhelming presence of myth and historical trauma in our lives. A cross between Saul Bellow’s disintegrating intellectuals and Bulgakov’s mystical revelations, this is a fiercely inventive novel.
Sandee Brawarsky
Poetic...ambitious…a novel to be reread, for its layers of meaning and symbolism, noise and silence, mystical resonances and lyrical passages. [Namdar’s] writing, in its deep and close observations, is prayerful.
Washington Book Review
Beautifully written and will absorb all your attention in first few minutes as you start reading it.
Mosaic Magazine
Above all, The Ruined House is a keenly observed meditation on the failing inner resources of American Jewry at the dawn of the 21st century.
Adam Kirsch
Namdar redefines what it means to tell a Jewish story... The originality and power of this idea [of Jewishness], along with Namdar’s fertile power of observation and evocation, make The Ruined House a new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read.
BookPage
The Ruined House, which won Israel’s biggest literary award (the Sapir Prize), is a fascinatingly claustrophobic year inside Andrew’s [the main character’s] mind…. A meditation on the isolation of the modern age, when one can live among millions of people in a vibrant city, yet still be utterly alone.
The 50 Coolest Books to Read This Summer: 2018 Newsweek
A wildly original novel about the mental, physical and spiritual undoing of an arrogant college professor—a secular Jew living in elitist New York on the eve of 9/11. Unsettling and beautifully written, Namdar captures the seduction of an ancient religion as the world begins to crack.
Lauren Belfer
With richly poetic prose, Ruby Namdar portrays a man who leads a successful, comfortable secular life—until he finds himself haunted by religious visions. The Ruined House is shocking, insightful, and deeply disturbing.
The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
Namdar’s artistic prose is imprinted on every page as he explores age-old recurring themes: sin, expiation, ruin and renewal. “The Ruined House” should not be read casually because the story presents thought-provoking perspectives of time-honored traditions and their place in today’s world.
Jewish Herald-Voice
Namdar may have written the Jewish- American novel for our time. It’s both disturbing and hypnotic, definitely one of the best novels of the year.
New York Journal of Books
Ambitious, multidimensional, and beautifully written.
Jewish Book Council
Namdar’s excellent writing (for which Halkin must also be recognized), acute observational commentary, and fluency in Jewish religious texts make this novel a towering achievement of contemporary Jewish literature.
Professor-Ruth R. Weiss
When I read Ruby Namdar’s The Ruined House in the original Hebrew, I was surprised by how idiomatically it evoked some of New York’s Upper West Side. When I read the recently published English translation, masterfully done by Hillel Halkin, I was surprised again to feel how the haunting fate of the Jerusalem Temple intrudes on the life of an otherwise unmindful Jew. Among the intriguing features of this book is the way in which things that are either strange or familiar in the two civilizations, ancient Israel and modern America, figure differently in the two languages themselves. One wonders how the book might read in French or Arabic.
Tablet Magazine
An absolute masterpiece, one of the most monumental works written in Hebrew in the last century... Take the time, make the effort, and you’ll see that the novel, like all great works, contains multitudes: It’s about American Jewry’s search for meaning. It’s about faith in modern times. It’s about Judaism’s radical messianic spirit and its rebirth in each generation. It’s about exilic life in the aftermath of the Temple’s demise. It’s about the struggle for foundations in an era that seems to be built entirely on intellectual, moral, spiritual, and emotional quicksand... It is, in short, the quintessential Hebrew novel. It’s hard to think of one more ambitious, more engaged with the core questions that have bedeviled Jews, in Israel and abroad, for so long. It’s also hard to imagine a novel like this being written in Israel: Its scope, its facility with both the trifles of contemporary life and the awesome rhythms of antiquity, its psychological depths and its theological seriousness-all those could have only been achieved far from the cauldron of everyday Israeli existence and its own boiling concerns.
Dara Horn
In another writer’s hands, this would be a novel about a midlife crisis. But Ruby Namdar takes the usual selfish questions about ego and fulfillment and empties them out, placing his main character and his readers directly on top of a fault line in the edifice of time. The Ruined House is about one man’s life and how the world opens beneath him, letting him fall into an ancient legacy that has always rumbled beneath the surface of our superficial world. A fantastic work about the past that lives within the present.
Colum McCann
In The Ruined House a ‘small harmless modicum of vanity’ turns into an apocalyptic bonfire. Shot through with humor and mystery and insight, Ruby Namdar’s wonderful first novel examines how the real and the unreal merge. It’s a daring study of madness, masculinity, myth-making and the human fragility that emerges in the mix.
Library Journal
11/01/2017
In 2015, Namdar, who now resides in New York, became the first writer living outside Israel to receive the Sapir Prize, Israel's top literary award. Shortly thereafter, however, the government passed a new law restricting the prize to writers living in Israel full time. Namdar says that his novel, about a professor who has visions of Jerusalem's Holy Temple, is a tribute to Jewish American writers such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick. (LJ 9/1/17)While the number of books being translated from Hebrew is still small, it has increased dramatically in the last several years, with less-well-known Israeli writers—particularly women authors and those from more diverse backgrounds—being published in English for the first time. Furthermore, that we're also seeing more novels, written by native English speakers and set in Israel and/or featuring Israeli characters, is further evidence that Israeli culture, and Israel in literature, can and does have a global reach. Recent examples include Nathan Englander's Dinner at the Center of the Earth (LJ 8/17), Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am (LJ 7/16), Nicole Krauss's Forest Dark (LJ 7/17), and Dalia Rosenfeld's The Worlds We Think We Know: Stories (Milkweed, 2017).
JANUARY 2018 - AudioFile
The word “herculean” best describes the struggle of narrator Paul Boehmer as he brings to life the colorful characters in this expansive and immersive novel. The featured character is New York University academic Andrew Cohen, whose nearly perfect life is coming apart as a result of a series of religious-based hallucinations. Boehmer affects an authoritative tone as he paints vivid images of contemporary New York City. He refuses to let excessive description and long sequences of seemingly useless information bog him down as he aids the author’s exploration of intellectual Jewish-American life at the turn of the 21st century. For a novel that is at times complicated and exasperating, Boehmer uses his premier vocal abilities and unmistakable intellect to “thread the needle” to an ultimately satisfying conclusion. R.O. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
