Past Continuous (novel)
Overlook Press 2004 reprint
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| Author | Yaakov Shabtai |
|---|---|
| Original title | Zikhron Devarim (זכרון דברים) |
| Translator | Dalya Bilu |
| Country | Israel |
| Language | Hebrew |
| Publisher | Siman Kriah |
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Publication date
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1977 |
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Published in English
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1985 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 282 pp, 389 pp in translation |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 11133408 |
| 892.4/36 19 | |
| LC Class | PJ5054.S2643 Z3313 1985 |
| Followed by | Past Perfect (Sof Davar) |
Past Continuous is a 1977 novel originally written in Hebrew by Israeli novelist Yaakov Shabtai. The original title, Zikhron Devarim (Hebrew: זכרון דברים) is a form of contract or letter of agreement or memorandum, but could also be translated literally as Remembrance of Things.
Past Continuous is Shabtai’s first, and only completed, novel. It was written as one continuous 280-page paragraph (broken up in the English translation), with some sentences spanning several pages.
The Novel focuses on three friends, Goldman, Caesar, and Israel, in 1970's Tel Aviv, as well as their acquaintances, love interests, and relatives. The story begins with the death of Goldman's father on April 1 and ends a little after Goldman's suicide on January 1. The past is woven into this short "present" period, through a complex stream of associations.
The three men, lurching between guilt and depression, lose themselves in sexual adventures, amateur philosophy or compare their lives unfavorably to those of their sometimes heroic, sometime pitiful elders. The older characters can always hold firm to something or other, whether socialism and hatred of religious Jews, insights gained in Siberia, or refusal to admit that Israel is not Poland. The younger characters seethe instead in doubt and sweat.
In Past Continuous Shabtai expresses the personal loss felt by the main characters, which is echoed by the changing city of Tel-Aviv, and infiltrates every narrative perspective:
From one day to the next, over the space of a few years, the city was rapidly and relentlessly changing its face…and Goldman, who was attached to these streets and houses because they, together with the sand dunes and virgin fields, were the landscape in which he had been born and grown up, knew that this process of destruction was inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, as inevitable as the change in the population of the town, which in the course of a few years had been filled with tens of thousands of new people, who in Goldman’s eyes were invading outsiders who had turned him into a stranger in his own city, but this awareness was powerless to soften the hatred he felt for the new people or the helpless rage which engulfed him at the sight of the destructive plague changing his childhood world and breaking it up…
This uncontrollable remembrance of events through the objects and landmarks that surround the characters point to their obsession with the past, neither nostalgic nor inspiring, but menacing, a reminder to the new generation that they could never achieve what past generations have. This theme is also presented through the occupations of the three main characters: Israel’s piano playing, Goldman’s translations and Caesar’s photography all require a prior model or text - they can only reflect reality, and never create anything original.
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