A Lyrical Meditation On Grief In 'Falling Out Of Time'
With grief still fresh in his own mind, the Town Chronicler also sets off to follow them, encountering the royalty of the region — a Duke — and a grief-stricken centaur. The centaur is a writing, thinking beast who tells the Chronicler that he "can't really understand anything" until he writes it down. "I must re-create it in the form of a story'" he declaims. "Yes — mix it into a story is what I need to do, have to do. And it must have plots! And imagination! And hallucinations and freedom and dreams! Fire! A bubbling cauldron!"
That's what Grossman tries to include in this dramatic work-out on grief, though as much as he can he pares everything down to the scale of the everyday, especially the language (as much as I can surmise without having read the Hebrew original) and tone. So, ironically, he gives us ordinary life, with nearly overwhelming grief that lives on and on after the death of the loved one, ordinary life with dukes and centaurs. From page one, as the mourners walk, the power of the simple language intensifies, as a single truth emerges for the high and low characters alike: The person they mourn for is dead, but the death is not dead.
Don't consider this last thought a spoiler. The surprising final truth lives on from the first lines of Falling Out of Time, this lyrical, keening Israeli version of our own Our Town, a book you may want to pick up, pace with, chant from aloud.