- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; First Edition edition (17 May 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571196918
- ISBN-13: 978-0571196913
- Product Dimensions: 17.3 x 11.4 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,418,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Nathan Englander is only 29, but his first collection of short stories has already been compared to the work of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. His characters are Jewish Americans--Hasidic to boot--and his subject-matter is the agony of family life, love lost and found and that favourite Jewish stand-by: guilt. Englander's touch, though, is light and relentlessly comic. His characters' fast-talking, self-deprecating dialogue wouldn't seem out of place in the TV series Seinfeld (when the newly converted Charles and his wife serve up a kosher dinner they promise "eighty dollars' worth of the blandest food you've ever had"; or then there's Mendel who wakes up thinking he's dead, says a prayer for himself, then worries "that the first thing he had done upon being dead was sin"). So deeply does Englander get into Yiddish culture that a glossary of terms would be useful to the goyshe reader, but it does enhance the atmosphere wherein a troubled people struggle with religious and cultural strictures that, at times, threaten to swamp their individuality. This is a deeply felt book, and Englander is a brilliant, subtle writer who challenges the neuroses of these chosen few with flair and the sympathy of a knowledgeable insider. --Lilian Pizzichini
Review
A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being Jewish with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, and especially Bernard Malamud. The pieces are set variously in contemporary Brooklyn Heights and Jerusalem, Nazi-ravaged Europe, and Stalinist Russia, and they feature such comically tormented characters as the title story's sex-starved husband, who is granted "relief" from his wife's extended menstrual cycle by the rabbi who sends him to a prostitute; a devoutly Orthodox Jew pressured by his materialistic wife into moonlighting as a department-store Santa Claus ("Reb Kringle"); and "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," an unassuming Wasp who inexplicably "realizes" he has become an Orthodox Jew - to the bellicose dismay of his astonished wife ("You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could God hate cheese?"). As beguiling as Englander's comic tales are, though, his skills are even more impressively displayed in several pieces that strike more somber notes. "Reunion," for example, paints a graphic first-person picture of a manic-depressive Brooklynite whose travels in and out of institutions make a living hell of his marriage and fatherhood. "The Tumblers" fashions its fable-like story of an insular city that resists contact with the outside world into a trenchant allegory of all the stages of Jewry under Nazism, from denial through martyrdom. "The Twenty-Seventh Man" is unpublished writer Pinchas Pelovits, who finds his voice, and completes the work he was born to create, after he is mistakenly rounded up among a group of eminent writers doomed to execution by Stalinist thugs. And the concluding "In This Way We Are Wise" memorably dramatizes the emotions of an American Jew in Jerusalem imperfectly adapting to both ongoing terrorist bombings and the city's phlegmatic fatalism. An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot called "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and a truly remarkable debut. (Kirkus Reviews)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A book. You are first drawn by the intriguing title, then you notice that some of the letters are smudged, as though tear-stained. Did you somehow spill water on the cover? No, the dust jacket is designed that way, to remind us that sometimes relief comes in the form of tears, sometimes in sexual release, sometimes in death.
The inside of the dust jacket is misleading - the title story, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges", is called "hilarious". Despite this, the praise is flowing (and you don't know differently, anyhow) and you are drawn into the stories between the covers. What do you find?
Writing that is masterful, but misdirected. A voice that is shockingly mature, incongruous with the photograph of the handsome boy on the cover. Stories that are obsessed with persecution, whether by the government or by loved ones or by one's peers or one's church. Few of the characters within these pages are unencumbered by expectation, by disappointment, by disillusionment.
You search the book for the "hilarious" story foretold and find the sad, pathetic tale of a man sexually rebuffed by his wife and given a special dispensation by his Rabbi to visit a prostitute "for the relief of unbearable urges". The result turns the tables on the poor fellow, but is not amusing. You continue reading; the last story, "In This Way We are Wise", contains the poetic, oddly beautiful, ruminations of a bomb-blast survivor and his sorrow at having lived. You are illuminated by the beauty of the prose, you are destroyed by its message.
You may enjoy reading about the Jewish experience, writers such as Roth, Singer, Bellow. Depending upon your focus you may read quite a bit of this literature or perhaps only a smattering in the New Yorker. You find that Englander glazes his prose with Judaica to the point that everything here is deeply flavored with it, so no matter how much or how little you read, you taste the culture of the Jewish people, whether they be modern Jews in Israel or Holocaust-era Jews in Poland.
You walk away enlightened, impressed, but perhaps a little depressed, too.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The inside of the dust jacket is misleading - the title story, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges", is called "hilarious". Despite this, the praise is flowing (and you don't know differently, anyhow) and you are drawn into the stories between the covers. What do you find?
Writing that is masterful, but misdirected. A voice that is shockingly mature, incongruous with the photograph of the handsome boy on the cover. Stories that are obsessed with persecution, whether by the government or by loved ones or by one's peers or one's church. Few of the characters within these pages are unencumbered by expectation, by disappointment, by disillusionment.
You search the book for the "hilarious" story foretold and find the sad, pathetic tale of a man sexually rebuffed by his wife and given a special dispensation by his Rabbi to visit a prostitute "for the relief of unbearable urges". The result turns the tables on the poor fellow, but is not amusing. You continue reading; the last story, "In This Way We are Wise", contains the poetic, oddly beautiful, ruminations of a bomb-blast survivor and his sorrow at having lived. You are illuminated by the beauty of the prose, you are destroyed by its message.
You may enjoy reading about the Jewish experience, writers such as Roth, Singer, Bellow. Depending upon your focus you may read quite a bit of this literature or perhaps only a smattering in the New Yorker. You find that Englander glazes his prose with Judaica to the point that everything here is deeply flavored with it, so no matter how much or how little you read, you taste the culture of the Jewish people, whether they be modern Jews in Israel or Holocaust-era Jews in Poland.
You walk away enlightened, impressed, but perhaps a little depressed, too.
Format:Paperback
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander is a great book. I could not find it at my book store so was thrilled that i was able to purchase it through Amazon. The book arrived swiftly and in great condition. Thank you very much.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Shades of black
Another purveyor of 'marah' (see my review of Criers and Kibitzers). Read this when it came out and it excited but left no trace; now I think I know why. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Simon G. Barrett
Unrelieved
I did not find the stories particularly engaging. The later stories are funnier such as "The Gilgul of Park Avenue. Read more
Published on 1 Dec 2009 by Gus John
almost life-changing
I loved this book! The evocation of lost Jewish communities, coupled with fantastic, honed, writing had me enthralled. Read more
Published on 13 Jun 2000
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