Volume 45, Number 4 · March 5, 1998
'Whither Dost Thou Hasten?'
By J.M. Coetzee
Panther in the Basement
by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange
Harcourt Brace, 147 pp., $21.00
The Iron Tracks
by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Jeffrey M. Green
Schocken, 195 pp., $21.00
In his new novella Amos Oz tells a story he has told several times before, sometimes as autobiography,[1] sometimes worked up into fiction. At its barest, the story is about a boy at a crossroads in his life: Is he to continue on the path of childhood, living out fantasies of violence encouraged in him by his immediate surroundings, or is he to break into the next stage of life, a stage at which he may be required to love as well as to hate, and at which questions may begin to have two sides to them?
Review, 4026 words
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