The Act of Transformation

The Wonder-Worker By Dan Jacobson

Little, Brown, 192 pp., $5.95 One must admire a writer like Dan Jacobson who suddenly decides in midcareer to move in a new direction and to set new creative problems for himself. One must admire him even more when his efforts result in successful, striking work. After producing for years extremely well written and penetrating “traditional” stories and novels dealing with his native South Africa ( A Dance in the Sun, Evidence of Love, The Beginners), Jacobson wrote The Rape of Tamar (1970) which retold, in a subtle, elliptical manner, the story of the attack upon King David’s daughter, Tamar, by her brother Amnon. Narrated by David’s scheming nephew Yonadab, the novel transcended mere historical fiction, concentrating not on period detail and exploration, but rather on moral issues raised by the events described and on the tricky problem of narrative credibility—how much of Yonadab’s account could we accept at face value, how much of the truth had he altered to suit himself? As with Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, we attempted to extract the truth from the narrator’s colored version of it.

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Ronald De Feo

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The Wonder-Worker By Dan Jacobson

Little, Brown, 192 pp., $5.95 One must admire a writer like Dan Jacobson who suddenly decides in midcareer to move in a new direction and to set new creative problems for himself. One must admire him even more when his efforts result in successful, striking work. After producing for years extremely well written and penetrating “traditional” stories and novels dealing with his native South Africa ( A Dance in the Sun, Evidence of Love, The Beginners), Jacobson wrote The Rape of Tamar (1970) which retold, in a subtle, elliptical manner, the story of the attack upon King David’s daughter, Tamar, by her brother Amnon. Narrated by David’s scheming nephew Yonadab, the novel transcended mere historical fiction, concentrating not on period detail and exploration, but rather on moral issues raised by the events described and on the tricky problem of narrative credibility—how much of Yonadab’s account could we accept at face value, how much of the truth had he altered to suit himself? As with Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, we attempted to extract the truth from the narrator’s colored version of it.