Voyage To The End Of The Millenium
(Abraham B. Yehoshua)
It is truly unfortunate when great literary works, like Voyage to the End of the Millennium, go out of print. Thankfully, the Internet has become the largest ?used? book marketplace ever conceived. At a time of millennial madness, as it was a few years ago, the world had a strange fascination with this number. The parallels are truly remarkable, allowing for the intervening years. This was a time prior to the Crusades and told from the perspective of a historical novel based in the year 999. It?s a voyage for the reader as much as it is a journey of the well-wrought characters.
The story is told by Abraham Yehoshua, a leading Hebrew writer, who provides the Western reader with a unique view of moral questions still plaguing society today, including the survival of the Jewish identity and human rights, especially those of women. It opens with the burning issue of bigamy and its affects, mostly negative, on both the friendship and business of the novel?s protagonist, a wealthy North African merchant by the name of Ben Attar. As he travels through European continent, the novel echoes the issues still brewing in modern-day Isreal concerning ideologies and customs.
Yehoshua is able to create a wonderful literary mirror which reflects and repulses the reader with lurid details of daily life during the 10th century. A mirror so faithful that it makes us uncomfortable, by its colorful and highly descriptive nature, etching a bygone era into our mind?s eye. To try to describe the narrative and multiple themes is a disservice to a potential reader. The author?s long-winded style and humor has been faithfully translated to provide English-speaking populations a rare glimpse of the past while affording them an equally-rare opportunity to reexamine their own spiritual and ethical beliefs within the context of this entertaining morality tale.
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