Book Review 2012-011
The Sensualist by Daniel Torday
2012 by Nouvella, 176 pages
(I bought this during the launch period of the title)
Daniel Torday has pretty successfully crossed the Russian novel with the Jewish American short story in his novella, The Sensualist. Torday has set his novella in a heavily Jewish suburb of Baltimore, and then narrowing that setting by having it predominantly deal with high school students. While at first this may seem to limit variables, Torday skirts this issue with both the normal high school cliques, but also by introducting Russian immigrants to the story.
Which leads the reader to a few main players--Samuel Gerson, not "the sensualist" of the title, but a second generation Jewish American, his grandfather hailing from Hungary; Dmitri Zilber, "the sensualist" of the title, arriving in the Baltimore suburbs from Moscow with his mother and sister during his high school years; Yelizaveta Zilber, Dmitri's sister; Tanya Weiss, Samuel's best friend prior to his junior year in high school; and Jeremy Goldstein, a teammate of Samuel's on the high school baseball team their first two years in the school.
The events leading to the beating Dmitri Abramovich Zilber and his friends would administer to Jeremy Goldstein at the end of my junior year of high school--an act that would make them the talk of every household in Pikesville for months after--started before Dmitri and I even met.
And so begins The Sensualist. Looking back at that first paragraph, I noted with interest that Torday fills in his reader right up front with a substantial event that will take place near the end of the book, and because of another event fairly early on, this particular reader had forgotten this opening and was a little surprised when the foreshadowed event occured. Torday also handles this major event in a very interesting way--Samuel Gerson is not present when the beating of Jeremy Goldstein takes place. He's in Long Island with his mother and father as his paternal grandfather has killed himself and they're cleaning his house and making arrangements. So, instead of receiving a first hand account of the incident from our narrator, we instead receive our account through the phone lines as Samuel does himself, when Dmitri calls to tell him that he's found himself in trouble.
Torday had included some interesting parallels between Samuel's grandfather and Dmitri's grandfather--prisoners in their homeland for instance--and through the death of his grandmother, talking more with his grandfather and then the cleaning process of the house, Samuel's coming-of-age takes maybe a silghty different route than had this storyline not been introduced. My long-winded way of saying that I don't think Torday placed Samuel away from the fight specifically to have that phone conversation occur, but I'm glad that it worked out that way as it allowed Dmitri to explain how the fight happened, what led to it, who did what, and what sort of trouble he thought it would lead to. While the novella really is about Samuel's coming-of-age, without Dmitri and his life theories and actions, there is no sensualist.
And what are those theories? What is a sensualist? Per Dmitri, through his readings of Dostoevsky, it is a person that constantly feels all of their emotions, one that acts upon exactly what he feels, says and does what comes to him--no filters.
I feel like I'm typing a lot without saying a whole lot with this review so far. The last thing I want to do is give you a rundown of the plot. The Sensualist is a really great read, one that sticks with you after you've turned the last page. It will undoubtedly remind you of your own high school years, whether you were one of the in crowd, or one looking to get to the in crowd. Torday does a fantastic job of getting into the head of a high school junior and exposing the thoughts on friendship, on family, on romance and relationships and sex, and on simply trying to figure out one's place and plans. There are literary cues for the reader, both subtle and not. There's enough action to keep those not looking for literary cues to be more than entertained. All this and more make The Sensualist a book you'll want to pick up and keep Daniel Torday on the list of authors whose name you scan for when you're in the bookstore in the future.
4 stars
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