![]() Raphael was born in Chicago in 1931, after his English father moved the family to the US to pursue a career in the oil industry. That is certainly the impression one gets from reading his latest volume of memoirs, Going Up: To Cambridge and Beyond – A Writer's Memoir. But his statement to Epstein must be granted some force: Raphael has written a lot, and when he is not writing (or talking about writing) his major preoccupations do not stretch far beyond the subjects of women and reputation – usually, his reputation. Raphael's portion of this dialogue is not distinguished by an especially notable aptitude (or appetite) for self-knowledge. In the course of their exchange, published, in 2013, as Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet, Raphael offered a self-assessment of his career: "I still write like a man who never wanted to do anything else much, except make love, of course, and a name, I guess." “Lindmann” is a most serious and courageous effort to set a mark and attempts what may be impossible, or intolerable-to answer major questions with ultimate ironies.Several years ago Frederic Raphael established an email correspondence with the American writer and essayist Joseph Epstein. Stephen Spender, who in the Book Review recently mourned the lack of audacity in British fiction, should pay attention to Frederic Raphael. His dysfunction saves the book from completeness, and what might have been an absolutely firstrate novel ends as a first‐rate charade.Īt the crucial moment, idea and character part company, but perhaps this is the flaw of prophecy. One wishes that Lindmann had gone on making people uneasy instead of turning out to be a mirage himself. Everyone who talks to Lindmann says one thing and means another, or nothing at all. Raphael's ear for the hyper‐cadences of contemporary verbalizers is so acute it borders on pain. The preacher raves the Jews deny grief for a sunny Zion, and over mugs of whisky, intellect seeks formulae for a new television series. officer in the name of mercy, gives herself to the artist in the name of lust. Motherhood, in the form of a sweet young woman who sacrificed herself to an S.S. Art in the form of an American Negro painter talks hip and fornicates. The conventions, which protect men from a sense of tragedy, shrivel. Raphael's anger, surfaces shimmer and vanish like mirages. “You are the dictionary,” Lindmann finally has to tell him, “which leaves out all the words.” Seeking a set of library steps on which to arrange his stacks of notes, he provokes a riot at a gospel meeting and brings down the wrath of an evangelist who declares the death of man is the life of Christ Jesus. ![]() Lindmann hears suffering explained in all terms but the right ones by the manufacturers of pseudo‐images and the moral grifters of London, the universal city of the 1960's. No rationale exists for the irrational sinking of the Broda, or for other, private sinkings. Wise, in the metaphysics of an insane social order, bent under the burden of survival, he stalks London in search of conscience, playing the Wandering Jew, dissociated, making spidery notes for letters he will never mail. To the people who know him in London after the war, he is a quiet man who lives in an eccentric rooming house, playing bridge and arranging his papers. Broda, an illegal derelict that went down off the Turkish coast in 1942 with more than 600 Jewish refugees aboard. Who is the enigma, Jacob Lindmann? The records of the British Foreign Office say he is one of two survivors of the sinking of the S.S. His laughter is that of a man through with screaming. He cannot make credible the necessity for suffering, but he understands it to the last rictus. ![]() In “Lindmann,” Frederic Raphael, a young American‐born Englishman, has harrowed the collective guilt to produce a novel of fury, humor, anguish and relevance. THE task of the writer, Philip Roth once observed, is to make credible the stupefying reality of our time.
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