A Mad Desire to Dance, by Elie Wiesel, translated by Catherine Temerson, Knopf, 274 pp. $25
Unfortunately, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, the author of approximately four dozen works (including Night and A Beggar in Jerusalem ), found himself dancing all the way to the brink when he discovered his “friend,” Bernard Madoff, had cleaned out both his personal and professional coffers.
So Wiesel, rather than crying over spilt milch and leaving this world – not to mention his Foundation – with zilch, elected to turn his hand to doing what he does best: Write.
Right. The results, of course, provide no hint of those catastrophic events plaguing its rags-to-riches-to-rags creator. In fact, A Mad Desire to Dance , a novel that sees Wiesel returning to his storytelling roots, succeeds despite the obviously devastating setback its author endured, suggesting that, somehow, he himself may have found solace in rising to the creative occasion.
And, rise Wiesel – the individual who first called that (in)human conflagration by the name we now take for granted, Holocaust – does (for here, in A Mad Desire to Dance , there ain't nowhere to go but up). Here, the well-known survivor of the concentration camps tackles the central question of existence, the one that, on balance, seems to have haunted him his entire adult life.
In making darkness (or madness) visible, Wiesel has additionally provided his legions of devoted followers with perhaps some of the finest – if not most accurately harrowing – writings in the tradition:
“Madness is what I'll talk to you about – madness burdened with memories and with eyes like everyone else's, though in my story the eyes are like those of a smiling child trembling with fear. ... That said, since I'm eager to tell you everything, you should know that I'll be telling you this story without any concern for chronology. ... What can I say? The madman's time is not always the same as the so-called normal man's.”
In the case of this particular madman, 60-year-old independently wealthy Doriel Waldman, an insomniac Polish expat who laconically calls NYC home, this so-called lunatic has spent much of his life – his lonely days and lonelier nights – attempting to come to terms with a despair and desolation so bone-deep not even five years of therapy with one of the world's most brilliant psychoanalysts, Thérèse Goldschmidt (herself the child of survivors who also slyly narrates sequences of this dislocated and disorienting fiction), can bring him to his senses according to “the standards imposed by a hypocritical society, adrift and doomed to perish from its fear of boredom.”
Waldman – walled man – cannot locate the key to unlock the door leading towards sanity and light, primarily because this hyper-intelligent lifelong student of Judaism, so devastated by twentieth-century terrors and an equally horrific personal history – his mother, a central figure in the resistance who may or may not have “dallied” during those years, in a cruel twist of fate, perishes in an automobile accident with his father shortly after WWII – firmly believes himself to be possessed by a dybbuk , a malevolent “force” somewhat akin to the shades populating The Divine Comedy , an evil spirit holding life itself against him so that he can scarcely breathe (let alone love or find lasting peace with anyone – real or imagined – despite those lavish trappings defining what he believes to be his “self”):
