The Nature of Blood

I read this book for a general lit class first semester of last year and became entranced by it. This book is magnetic, it pulls you in and you are left to helplessly turn the pages while your eyes devour each carefully chosen word, which are strung together to make an unforgettable novel. I am a biochemistry major, but have a profound love of reading and writing. When I had to write a paper on this novel last year, i found the maximum of 10 pages stifling. There is just so much to this book, the literally angles and interwoven humanity through each masterfully-crafted tale contained within it, leaves one open to a vast sea of topics on which to write. I hope to one day teach a class which intertwines literature and science, this will certainly be a book on the list. Everyone should be exposed to the extreme humanity of this novel.

An incredible lyrical treatment of the history of the Jewish tribe. The story of a young woman, Eva Stern, fro Germany in the early 1930s, to the ghetto, the concentration camp, and final liberation. Without the usual accusing finger, yet bringing forth the shocking truths of utter human degradation. But the nature of Blood also deals with black Othello and white Desdemona, and a Jewish Ethiopian transplanted into Israel, the land yearned for and ending up disappointing. But the finale tells us that liberation does not set us free. We can not wipe out the past and understand the future: it is a foreign land to us and we do not fit.A wonderful, but deeply disturbing book. It should be widely read.

In an age like the present, in which even a minor event can sometimes be elevated to a "life-changing experience," one hesitates to say that one short book permanently changed someone's perception of the world, but it did for this reader. I was absolutely stunned by Caryl Philips's The Nature of Blood! The book deals primarily with Eva, a 21-year-old concentration camp survivor and her life, thoughts, and memories. A second major story line involves Othello, hired by the Doge to lead the Venetian army against the Turks in the late 15th century, and his life and passionate love for Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian aristocrat. The two seemingly disparate stories are connected thematically, rather than narratively, as the book alternates from character to character and across time lines. Two other characters (Eva's uncle and an Ethiopian Jew who immigrates to Israel) have their space here, along with a 15th century trial of Jewish money-lenders in Venice, which connects obliquely with the Othello story. The novel, which is not linear and does not follow a typical narrative pattern, is very impressionistic, more like a symphony than a traditional novel, with movements and complimentary themes playing in counterpoint to each other, The author experiments successfully with a variety of voices and points of view, switching back and forth through nearly 500 years of history and several pain-filled settings as he illustrates his themes. It is an intense and emotionally involving story of cultural, religious, and ethnic persecution, rivaling Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces in its impact. A truly remarkable achievement. Mary Whipple

In spare but eloquent prose, Mr. Phillips conveys the bleak pain of the "other." In tying different time points together in four distinct narratives he shows us how little difference there is in the treatment of minorities outside their own lands, whether they be Jews or people of color, or both.By giving us the language of the oppressor he shows us the inherent falsity of their ideas, and consequently the justifiable bewilderment that human beings can be treated with such cruelty for no reason whatsoever.A thoroughly heart-rending but totally convincing read.

Life does not exist in a vacuum. Chain of events do occur, relationships about the past and the present exist, and comparisons between various attitudes and time periods can be made. The Nature of Blood, by Caryl Phillips is a very powerful novel that does not just focus on one aspect of a given situation, but does indeed take a more realistic approach on the subject of prejudice by broadening the problem into several distinct but comparable stories. Each story adds a new dimension or nuance to describe this problem that has always existed, and because of this the book evolves into four connecting stories that are somewhat disjoint in the handling of each situation, but ultimately fit into a cohesive pattern. In the beginning of the novel, the reader may only believe that the book is about the sad character, Eva, who was victimized by the holocaust. Her compelling story is very reminiscent of Schindler's List in the horrific descriptions of life and death in the camps, but with the intimacy of The Diary of Anne Frank in the first-person perspective. Eva, as the only survivor of her immediate family, is transformed from an innocent, naive, and normal girl into a young woman whose words have a deep heaviness and the strange kind of sadness that one has when experiencing that emotion so long that it almost becomes indifference. As the author switches from Eva to the Jewish bankers of not quite 500 years prior, the reader looks for something that will connect the two stories. The characters themselves are unrelated, the setting quite different with one in Portobuffole and the other in Germany, and the scale of disaster much greater in Eva's Germany. However, there are many commonalities between the stories. Both involve a common people, the Jews, and both stories involve the mass hysteria of the majority people, the Christians in both stories. In Eva's story, the specific reasons for the death camps are never given, but the hysteria of the Germans and the hate that they propagated against the Jews was evident. The story of the Portobuffole Jews, however, evolves mostly around how such an event could build up and occur. Readers are taken step by step through each phase of this tragic story. The Venetian Jews were originally driven from Germany early in the 15th century as they stood accused of causing the plague with their "evil ways". Their condition in Portobuffole, however, is not much improved as they were required to identify themselves as Jewish by the yellow stitching on their clothes and the markers outside their front doors. In times of peace, they were relatively safe as they were in Germany. However, Portobuffole was recovering from famine and the war with the Turks and the citizens were uneasy. The Christians of Portobuffole did not understand the strange customs of the Jews. But, most of all, the largest complaint against the Jews were that they were too much relied upon for money lending. The result of this story