The Nature of Blood
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Product Description
Book Description
An unforgettable novel about loss and persecution, courage and betrayal, and about the terrible pain and necessity of human memory
Product Description
A novel about personal crisis and momentous social conflict, Caryl Phillips sixth novel tells the inextricably linked stories of a young Jewish woman growing up in mid-twentieth-century Germany, and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth-century Venice. At the heart of these stories is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with similarity and difference, with blood. This is a novel about how we define ourselves and consequently, it is about the most dangerous and nightmarish aspects of our identity.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book concerns blood, or rather how we have allowed our notions of blood to determine our cruel actions towards others. It is a book not to be read lightly, nor for those with a weak stomach. It is book full of compassion and wisdom. It is a story that spans centuries, countries, fates, and yet is tersely written, no wasted description, no loss of pace. It ties together the fates of the Jews and the blacks in a way that is moving and plausible. The coda set in modern day Israel brings together the thematic threads - showing too that the Promised Land is not so perfect either; not all the promise was fulfilled. I wept in the Holocaust scenes: the style becomes indirect, impersonal, terribly frank. I have read the same (or similar) elsewhere, but the shock never diminishes. This is a book that should be read because it has real moral force, it has seriousness. It is not (like so much modern fiction) merely a story for its own sake, a tale to shock or provoke, shruggingly amoral, but is clearly and yet poetically telling us about the way we are, the way we think. It is saying: look, this is what the Venetians did to the Jews, how they justified their persecution, this is what the Germans did, what next? And it is also saying: look, yesterday's war heroes are lonely and wistful. No action, no matter how heroic, no decision no matter how right, is without a certain price to be paid. There is much here (historically) that one already knows, but the seriousness and the power of the writing, the structure, the poignancy and the truth of the book: all this is Phillips' achievement.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this novel Caryl Phillips considers the nature of oppression and its universality. He tells the story of Eva, a German Jew and her family as they live through their last days of freedom before they are sent to the camps. Running parallel to this story is the tale of Othello attempting to make his mark in a Venice which is segregating and punishing Jews for 'their own good'. Phillips conveys both the whimsical nature of prejudice as well as the terrible impact that it has and still has in society today. Surrounding these stories is the sense of dislocation and injustice that is engendered by indiscriminate discrimination that has been the history of the Jewish people. The novel ends with a modern black woman still experiencing a sense of inferiority in a world that claims to believe in equality. The only mistake to make when reading this book is to assume that Phillips is placing all these experiences under the single title of 'oppression'. He does more than this as he endows his characters with the spirit of resistance that allows them to defy the labelling of the oppressed and the weak. This is a novel that challenges the way we think about people and the way in which we assume that the experience of oppression is a collective experience that denies autonomy.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Eva, a 21-year-old concentration camp survivor, shares her life, thoughts, and memories in the primary plot line of this moving novel. In a second major story line, Othello, hired by the Doge to lead the Venetian army against the Turks in the late 15th century, reveals his passionate love for Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian aristocrat. These two seemingly disparate stories are connected thematically, rather than narratively, as the book alternates from character to character and across time lines. Two other characters (Eva's uncle and an Ethiopian Jew who immigrates to Israel) have their space here, and a 15th century trial of Jewish money-lenders in Venice also connects obliquely with the Othello story.
The novel, which is not linear and does not follow a typical narrative pattern, is very impressionistic, more like a symphony than a traditional novel, with movements and complimentary themes playing in counterpoint to each other, The author experiments successfully with a variety of voices and points of view, switching back and forth through nearly 500 years of history and several pain-filled settings as he illustrates his themes. It is an intense and emotionally involving story of cultural, religious, and ethnic persecution, stunning in its impact. Mary Whipple
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Purity, that's what we want
Caryl Phillips' ambitious novel tackles an essential human problem. After closely reading his text, one comes to the conclusion that his vision on mankind is ink black. Read more
Published 23 days ago by Luc REYNAERT
If only Othello hadn't made an appearance in this book
There were parts in this book of outstanding beauty. The story of Eva and her family was superbly told. Read more
Published 12 months ago by H. Lacroix
Fire and Ice
This is no doubt a remarkable book. Phillips' style is cold and clinical, even when dealing with the stomach-churning horrors of the holocaust; his approach to his material is... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Iwamiyama
Thoughtful, passionate and heady
This thoughtful, passionate and heady novel threads together stories of people separated by time and space but linked together in one way or another however tenuously. Read more
Published on 1 May 2009 by Gary Selikow
As expected, utterly fantastic.
I have read several of Caryl Phillips' novels, and they never fail to impress. Although The Nature of Blood focuses mainly on Europeans rather than West Indians or Africans, the... Read more
Published on 18 May 2000
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