In Novik’s books, this historic verisimilitude coexists with the magic. “You can’t suck blood from a stone,” a character complains, while another notes, “I walked home pleased as a cat.” The phrasings are colloquial, but slightly archaic: “My heart was glad as birds.” Such lines give the book the lyricism of a homey fable while anchoring it in Yiddish, or at least Eastern European, culture. The roots of this work are apparent in its language, its metaphors speaking of an older, primarily rural world. As imagined in Spinning Silver, Novik’s comprehensive re-telling of the Rumplestiltskin story, her characters deal with obstacles as deadly as poverty and anti-Semitism and as sharp as hunger and the biting cold. In the hands of fantasy author Naomi Novik, they acquire another dimension still she looks at these traditional societies, Jewish or gentile, by way of a contemporary sensibility, with a gloss of magic thrown in. These tales – the artful gleanings of survival-conscious Jews and other minorities – have remained relevant to generations removed from the shtetl. Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik. Del Ray, $28, 480 pp.Įastern European folklore has long been mined by writers, inspiring authors as diverse as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Helen Oyeyemi. This is a winning book, conveying a strangely believable fantasy about three strong young women in a world not that far removed from our own.
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May 2023
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