A Moving Pseudomemoir

If the words “curriculum vitae” set you shuddering with career anxiety, Yoel Hoffmann’s new work goes a long way to remind you of their original meaning—the “course of life.” While the content of Hoffmann’s “Curriculum Vitae” traces the curvature of a rich but not wildly unusual life, the unfettered poetry by which he conveys his experiences buoys the text into the realm of the genuinely distinctive.

Hoffmann underscores his intimacy with the story, which closely parallels his own life, by sharing his name with the narrator. The reader enters the narrator’s life during the 1940s. Living in what would become Israel, Hoffmann’s mother dies in the first line while British soldiers mill around the fringes of his memory. As is his wont, the speaker transmits his reactions to the moments that are most eventful by way of the images he recalls alongside them. The memories that tie themselves to his mother’s death, his time in a children’s home, and his father’s remarriage are mostly grim—young, scarred legs and bodily worms abound. But his frankness, perhaps the book’s most noteworthy quality, permits the often-comic process of learning to temper the bleak surroundings he sometimes faces. We watch his evolution through adolescence, transmitted in extremely spare formulations that one hesitates to call prose. It might be a good time to again call attention to the title; Hoffmann offers succinct summations, highlighting the most important images as the narrator perceived them, not in the way that the form of the conventional novel dictates. Each sentence (only one or two of which will ever dwell on the same topic) is marked by innovative precision and great affection for the subject matter. Sometimes Hoffmann is blatantly avant-garde. Titled doodles highlight seemingly random phrases from the text, there are no page numbers to be found, and the speaker adopts the royal “we” for a period (though not without specifying parenthetically each time that what he means is “I”).

But the work is so moving not because of these eccentricities but rather because of the artfulness with which Hoffmann articulates the smallest events. “Stairwells make us weep,” he says, “And small kitchens. Sometimes you see a fork and you just want to die. There is no limit to the beauty of things.” What might seem overblown out of context is actually the ardent crescendo at the end of a string of meditations.

The lull of this rising and falling of register is at times almost powerful enough to obscure the story. Hoffmann marries, has children, comes to love Japanese culture, and eventually becomes a professor, writing all the while. The different planes of the story—Rabbi Kook Street in Ramat Gan, Japan, Amsterdam—drift hazily into one other. When he halts the waves of meditation for more concrete narrative material, the tongue-in-cheek presentation suggests that dabbling in the realm of standard exposition is another of his little experiments. The University of Haifa, for example, is an index of the expected, so he can be flippant with the details: “People walk about with names like Kaplinksi or Eshtahaul or Bar-Ziva, and girls walk around in various colors, and all enter and exit rooms with the number 526 or 3002,” he writes.

But in time, he reveals that a code of some kind underlies his authorial choices. He alludes to the birth of his children, pointing to the bud of the “true” story then placing it deferentially aside. One does not get the sense that the sparseness of the secondary characters is simply a matter of avoiding lawsuits or friendly respect for privacy. It seems that, for Hoffmann, if the truth may also belong to someone else, he cannot presume to offer the definitive version and so will deliberately stray. He is fundamentally concerned with honest communication, and he beautifully distills the small revelations from the events of his particular life.

To read “Curriculum Vitae” is to briefly shadow the patterns of a remarkable mind. When Hoffman’s Japanese teacher eventually commits suicide, he next recalls a woman from the Association of Soldiers’ Mothers who drowned while crossing the Jordan. By specifying that fish devoured them both, he illuminates the link between them. Mortality does not leave Hoffmann’s mind for long, but the myriad ways he acknowledges the presence of death give the text sustained gravity without making it oppressive. The book is not suspenseful; lives move in their immutable arcs, but he captures the beautiful intersections of these solitary shapes exquisitely.

The temptation to allegorize his story looms as large as the historical-political context contained therein. But Hoffmann’s narrative looks so thoughtfully inward that it seems unjust to dilute the quality of this introspection with politics. Hoffmann creates an impressionistic, hypnotic representation of the content of a human life. His account is marked by a powerful sense of wonder at his surrounding planet, at the karmic electricity that seems to flow through it and, less overtly, at his own capacity for growth.

Though humorous and often irreverent, this curious cocktail of recollections is a penetrating piece of wisdom. He takes the opportunity to show the reader something true, even if here or there the details have been changed, and this account brims with compassion. He explains, “If I were able (by means of a deeper covenant than that which exists between author and reader) to fall to people’s necks and say to them ‘Come, let’s sit while the tea is steeping, then drink, and you’ll tell me about your lives and I will tell of mine,’ I’d toss this manuscript into the trash and do precisely that. In such a world the law would forbid the making of fiction.” We should not be so disappointed that such a world does not presently exist.

—Staff writer Amanda C. Lynch can be reached at aclynch@fas.harvard.edu.