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Article: A Novel Takes Talmudic Shape; Apikoros Sleuth
- Article from:
- Forward
- Article date:
- February 25, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightProvided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Greenstein, Michael
Forward
02-25-2005
By Robert Majzels
The Mercury Press, 110 pages, $19.95.
Quebec translator, play-wright and novelist Robert Majzels has composed his
most demanding work in his third novel, "Apikoros Sleuth," as he stretches
the genre to its limits. Replete with Joycean puns, neologisms and
vertical, horizontal, and marginal lines in Hebrew, Aramaic, English,
French, Chinese and Greek, the novel's columnar construction imitates the
book's cover and setting of the murder mystery -- a tenement. An amalgam of
mystery and talmudic format, high- and low-brow, scatology and eschatology,
"Apikoros Sleuth" defies the reader's expectations, challenging the act of
reading itself. On the ...