City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter

Temim Fruchter is an old acquaintance of mine. Someone I haven't seen in several years, but have followed with interest from a distance on social media or through word from mutual friends. When her book came out earlier this year, I looked forward to reading it. She did a book event at Books Are Magic with Mara Wilson that I put in my calendar, only to discover a couple days before that it was sold out. "Congratulations, Temim!" I thought. I kept meaning to pick up a copy of City of Laughter from one of my local bookshops, but eventually ended up buying my copy from bookshop.org when I was ordering some other books just to finally get it because I'd been intending to for months. I started it last Sunday.

It's strange to read a novel by someone you know. It's hard not to overlay everything you know about the person onto the characters, maybe even more when it's someone you don't know well because there are more gaps in your knowledge of the person to fill in with the fictional version. I found myself doing this for the first several chapters of City of Laughter especially – the parts where the central character, Shiva, was in Brooklyn. But gradually as the book went on, Shiva went to Warsaw, and other characters became more centered, I was finally able to break free of my preconceptions and just get into the world of the book. The story jumps around across time and generations, with some beautiful tangents to recount a folk story or a study of park benches or some other disconnected line of thought. At times it was hard to see how these fragments all fit together, but they were told so beautifully (the prose in this book is wonderful) that I almost didn't care. And then in the end, it sort of did make sense, because rather than providing resolution – a thing Shiva expects to appear and make sense of everything – the book chooses a different path. That finding needn't be the goal; the act of seeking can be and end in itself.