Jonathon Keats. The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six. New York: Random House, 2009. 221 pages.
Mysticism is a dangerous beast for fiction writers. At its best, writing about mystical ideas can be inspiring, magical. At its worst, it is obscure and inaccessible to non-initiates. So a book inspired by ideas from medieval Jewish mysticism isn’t necessarily a slam dunk.
With The Book of the Unknown, Jonathon Keats succeeds in creating stories that are otherwordly, yet understandable. The book, framed by a fictional letter from the “author” and a closing afterward from the editors, is a collection of tales about the lamed-vov, or thirty-six hidden ones, obscure everyday saints whose righteousness redeems the world. The thing is, no one knows who the lamed-vov are, not even them, and they aren’t always conventionally God-fearing.
So Keats’ collection includes an idiot, a thief, a clown, a cheat, and my favorite, a gambler. This is one of the best distillations of the gambling ethos I’ve seen yet, and it’s sure to become an assigned reading for future students in my gambling-related courses. The story’s final line is a masterpiece–the kind of sentence that writers struggle for weeks, and it’s sure to be quoted elsewhere as an epigram.
Keats renders dialog in the same style as Charlie Huston–no quotation marks, no “he said/she said,” just an emdash to indicate someone is speaking. The more I see of this, the more it grows on me. It’s an effective way of letting the speech stand on its own, which gives it more dramatic weight.
The book’s meta-plot, a professor who’s made a discovery that leads him into possible danger, recalls Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, as does the its kabbalistic bent. But mystical concepts themselves don’t play into the stories, nor do Jewish ideas, either religious or cultural. Besides the occasional rabbi as an authority figure, there’s nothing specifically Jewish about the characters and plotlines. None of tales are tied to any particular era or locale–they are set in a vaguely medieval Europe with kings and merchants, farmers and fisherman. So accurate historical fiction this is not, but this is not really a drawback. The characters and ideas take center stage, and emphasizing details like the name of the river that runs by the town or the exact method used to plow the fields, while they would be a part of realistic world-building in another genre, would trivialize the folkloric style that gives the book its power.
The Book of the Unknown is a fascinating collection of ideas in story form, tales about a town where… or a king who… It’s a great read that’s sure to be thought-provoking.