Good Book, Good Time for the Mountains

With a title like A Journey to the End of the Millennium, A Novel of the Middle Age, by A. B. Yehoshua, one might surmise it could be a bit ponderous. Yes it was, but it deserved all the pondering and perseverance it asked of the reader. It is set in 999 of the Christian calender. The main character is a Moroccan Jewish merchant, his Muslin partner and his nephew, a partner at first and last but not in the middle. It's a picture of the difference between the sunny and very sophisticated civilization of North Africa and the dark, crabbed, restrictive civilzation of Paris and the Rhineland whence the merchant travels with his two beloved wives. The story is too complex to tell in a short note and it gets ever more complex as it progresses. Yehoshua is an honored novelist in Israel. Knowing something about Jewish rituals and history is helpful to appreciate the story. This is not a new book but worth digging up in a library or Amazon for, in fact, it is a masterpiece and finally totally entrancing.

So -- moving on to lighter matters. There will be a hiatus in blog writing while I do one of those things many American families used to do before theme parks became destinations -- my daughters and I are going to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons to look at a few of America's many wonders and with hopes of seeing quite a few of the big wild animals in those regions. We're multiply celebrating birtdays, mine being the most auspicious but theirs being important, too, of course. There will be animal photo before there are more quilt photos, I think. Do stop in at my other blog and, I hope, read some of it; the entries there are longer and more thoughtful.