Review of Falling Out of Time by David Grossman

This is one the most touching books written by the famous Israeli writer David Grossman. We are speaking about "Falling Out of Time”, (buy here) a book that is also an intimate work born just to explore the inner world of a man struggling with loss. In this book, loss is the one of a son, the same son of the author. David Grossman, indeed, lost his son during the second Lebanon war. The grief for the death of a son is always endless and perhaps just writing can prevent that a father gets crazy for this. Falling out of Time is right the narration about this death. The book opens with a scene of a father that a day stands up and say to his wife he must go there! The woman doesn’t understand where his husband is going. "There", for the author, is a not place, a hideout for his severely injured soul. The wife, who is also the mother of the dead son, is struggling with the deepest and unspeakable mourning of life, too, but she doesn’t want to go there because she doesn’t know "There". What the author calls “there” is a journey across unknown streets, where the man meets other people struggling with grief and loss, such as a cobbler, a midwife, a net-mender, an elderly maths teacher, a duke, a town-chronicler and at last his wife. All these people lost their children and are fighting to overcome their grief. It is always very hard to escape pain, but the author, tries to defeat it just through his journey and the pain sharing, knowing what others feel, when they loss someone, especially a son, is a way to go back with the mind and seek peace and consolation. But with this book, readers will discover the harshness of loss and its terrible aftermath. Loss changes, turns away and destroys people. During his journey, the author retraces other pain, remembers his loved son and creates an intimate work that is also a mystic text leading to reflect and think back to the meaning of our entire life. We could define the book as a religious text, because only a man full of faith can be capable to seek the memory of a lost son in a place simply called “there”. In this place, there are those seeking a truth and others, like the wife of the main character, who decide to remain where they already are. Whatever the journey or not, everybody must face loss, sooner or later. Grossman does it with a unique tone and a high style of writing. Falling Out of Time, indeed, is written like a screenplay, with sentences arranged like a poetry. In this book, poetry becomes a silent cry of pain, a way to take out of the soul literary thoughts about death that none would never the courage to tell.