- Paperback: 235 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (1 Jun 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099289458
- ISBN-13: 978-0099289456
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 45,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
New York writer and critic Cynthia Ozick was shortlisted for the 1997 National Book Award (the American Booker Prize) with this novel. In it, she creates her most compelling fictional character yet--Ruth Puttermesser--a name fittingly ridiculous (it means "butter knife" in German) for such a monumental perfectionist. Ruth is obsessed with learning, and afraid of love; she is the token Jewish female in a top-notch Manhattan law firm, where Jews never get to be made partners no matter how hard they practise their squash strokes. But Ozick turns Ruth's story into a resonant parable that has no room for social realism. When Ruth's career takes a downslide, her fantasy life takes an upturn. She yearns for a daughter, and creates the first recorded female golem. Together they campaign to make Ruth mayor, and then create an Eden out of corrupt and filthy New York. But the dream turns sour when the golem turns against her mistress displaying the voracious need for sex and power that Ruth so assiduously suppresses. Ozick's cerebral, comic narration subtly offsets the fantastic events she describes. And despite Ruth's need for life to resemble Platonic ideals, her humanity is stamped on every page. --Lilian Pizzichini
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York and yearns for a daughter. So she creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Labouring in the dusty crevices of the civil services, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Although The Puttermesser Papers is billed as a novel, it is not a novel in the traditional sense but rather five short works of fiction, each of which could stand alone. Each "story" gives us insight into the life of Ruth Puttermesser, student, idealist and lover of the law. These fictions illuminates various stages of Puttermesser's life, about a decade apart, and beginning when Puttermesser is thirty-four.
Although we come to realize in the first story that this will constitute a biography of sorts, it is a very different biography in that the facts seem, more often than not, to contradict themselves. Identity, in Puttermesser's world, is something very elusive and suspect. For example, we witness a conversation between Puttermesser and her Uncle Zindel only to later learn that the conversation really did not occur.
This is a surrealistic book and we learn to accommodate its contradictions. In fact, after a time, they even become rather comforting rather than disorienting. Life, after all, is full of contradictions and Ozick wisely challenges the very idea that one's life story can be set in stone and fully told. What is consciousness and what is below the surface, she seems to be asking. Is life more accurately represented by external or internal experience? Ozick shows us Ruth Puttermesser's life from both the external and the internal viewpoint and she also leaves a good many gaps in between. One thing, though, is abundantly clear: Puttermesser's life as a lawyer in the New York City Department of Receipts and Disbursements is, internally, far richer than it is externally.
We first encounter the eternally unattractive Ruth Puttermesser in bed, engaged in the study of the Hebrew grammar she loves so much and eating the fudgy sweets to which she seems addicted. In fact, the only thing more enticing for Puttermesser than a night of Hebrew grammar and fudge seems to be the idea of paradise, a paradise in which she envisions herself voraciously reading anything and everything she somehow managed to miss while on earth.
While waiting on paradise, however, Puttermesser must endure the day-to-day bureaucracy of city government. This is a bleak existence, but one in which Puttermesser dreams of ideals like merit and justice for all. As an independent candidate from the Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Justice party, Puttermesser dreams of running for mayor and transforming New York into a place where youth gangs wash cars for fun, where slum dwellers suddenly transform their own dwellings out of a sense of pride and nothing else and pimps decide it's high time they learn some computer skills. In short, Puttermesser dreams of transforming New York into a place that is simply not New York.
In a section entitled Puttermesser Paired, the heroine develops and idealized friendship with a younger man in which she confirms her belief that the brain is the seat of the emotions. The man, a reproduction painter, does little more than read with Puttermesser, something that fascinates them both, and their relationship is the very embodiment of George Eliot's romantic life.
The final section, Puttermesser in Paradise, is a Mobius strip and suggests that the written word is tantamount to life, itself. This is a picaresque and surreal book and one that is highly entertaining if not completely fulfilling. Sadly, I think it will appeal to only a very limited audience.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a quite remarkable book by an author who deserves much greater recognition in the UK and Europe. Described as a novel, the book is really a set of short stories relating different aspects of the life (or possible lives?) of the eponymous heroine. So rich is the range of ideas and use of language that trying to capture a sense of them in the few words allowable here would be pointless. At the end one is left in wonder both by then events and the author's skill and imagination. That should be enough of a recommendation for any serious reader.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When David Foster Wallace listed what he thought of as the greatest Old Guard writers in America, they were: Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Cynthia Ozick. This should tell you what you need to know. If not, seek out the first three writers. In five longish short stories, Ozick meshes the cerebral, the witty, the stylish, the heartfelt, and the inventive. The result is utterly merciless. You finish it and feel something powerful, and suspect that it might be the sublime, whatever that is. The last thing I want to do is raise expectations for something that should be a surprise, a wonderful discovery. So I will say no more.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Brains are no guarantee. Hope is slim.
This novel consists in five episodes in the life of Ruth Puttermesser (her surname means butter knife) and it is a restless, energetic book that skitters from fantasy to satire, to... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Eileen Shaw
Ruth needs a break
It's not that I didn't enjoy reading this book or most of it. Ozick is a interesting writer with a unique style which I liked but the story was incredible depressing. Read more
Published on 14 July 1998
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