With Reverent Hands: Call it Sleep

I bring you with reverent hands / the books of my numberless dreams.

-WB Yeats, "A Poet To His Beloved"

WB Yeats, I'm sure, gave books to his beloved that he valued highly himself, and that he handled with reverence.  If you had to recommend a book you revered to someone, what would it be?
 
I'm asking you to highlight one book.  One book that you adore, that you prize, that changed your life, that you would save from a burning building, that you found serendipitously on a library shelf or at a used bookstore, looking lonely and ignored.  A book that thrills you but that, you have come to realize, no one else has really ever heard of, much less read.  With Reverent Hands is all about those books- the ones that deserve a wider audience than they are given and that you want everyone to go out and read, even if they are out of print.

EDITED:  Eek!  I forgot my entire paragraph about this week's guest poster!  Massive apologies to Laura, who writes at Reading & Rooibos!  Like many of the blogs I follow, I am not sure when I started reading Laura's blog, or how I first came upon it.  But when I started making folder assignments in Google Reader recently (a thankless job), I didn't even hesitate to put her on the "A-List" because she reads such a variety of books!  Everything from Louis L'Amour to Sapphire!  I really enjoy her blog and I hope my lapse in the guest poster description paragraph doesn't mean you all won't go visit her blog!

What book are you highlighting?
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, first published in 1934.

When did you first read it?

I'd never even heard of Call It Sleep before it appeared on the syllabus of an American Lit course I took during undergrad. My professor made a conscious choice to include books we may not have encountered in other literature courses and this was one of the selections my classmates and I read with fresh eyes. I still have the copy I purchased for that class with all of my underlining and other notations in it. The pages are almost ready to start falling out at this point!

What is it about?  Please give a brief summary.

David Schearl is the child of Jewish parents who journeyed to New York City from Austria in 1907. The storyline follows an often alienated David from early childhood through adolescence, shedding light on his familial, sexual, and religious awakenings. The core emotion of the novel is David's intense love for his mother and pervasive anxiety at even the merest possibility of being separated from her.

What makes the book stand out to you?  Why do you love it?

Call It Sleep is one of the richest tales of immigrant life I've ever read. Roth is particularly masterful at showing us the multilingual nature of David's daily experiences, incorporating hints of the Yiddish spoken by the Schearl family at home as well as the broken English of the kids he encounters on the street and the Hebrew used at his school. Roth's writing makes even the smallest details pop from the page; the sights, sounds, and smells wafting through David's world were almost palpable as I read.

Please finish this analogy:  If you liked _____________, you'll probably enjoy this book.

The two books I associate with Call It Sleep are The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I read Faulkner's classic novel shortly before Call It Sleep and while the books are very different overall--Roth's work certainly has a more easily definable narrative arc-- the glimpses into David's thoughts sometimes reminded me of Faulkner's use of stream-of-consciousness. My mental link between Irving and Roth is the role of religion in the lives of their protagonists as they grow and come into their own.

What sort of person would you recommend to read this book?

Readers of historical fiction with an interest in immigrant experiences in the early twentieth century or Jewish literature will find much to treasure in Call It Sleep. If you happen to get a copy with an introduction by Alfred Kazin in it, please don't read that until after you've finished the book. It gives away many of the major events!

Do you have any quotes you would like to share?

"He went out into the hallway. Behind him, like an eyelid shutting, the soft closing of the door winked out the light. He assayed the stairs, lapsing below him into darkness, and grasping one by one each slender upright to the banister, went down. David never found himself alone on these stairs, but he wished there were no carpet covering them. How could you hear the sound of your own feet in the dark if a carpet muffled every step you took? And if you couldn't hear the sound of your own feet and couldn't see anything either, how you be sure you were actually there and not dreaming?"