Review: The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman

The Angel of Losses

By Stephanie Feldman
Published by Ecco, and distributed by HarperCollins  (2014)
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's
Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I very much enjoyed this book, even though it isn’t the kind of thing I normally read (it was another Amazon sale book—an August monthly deal, I believe).  It’s not the kind of thing I’ll normally review here, either, but I’m doing so because there’s an academic connection.  The Angel of Losses is a Jewish magical realist narrative about family, faith, and the enduring power of stories.  It is very well written and compelling, but the narrative style might not be for everyone; Feldman intersperses her first-person narration set in the present day with folk tales as written down in the main character’s grandfather’s notebooks, and some readers might find this cumbersome or confusing.

The main story in The Angel of Losses follows Marjorie, a grad student in English who is writing her dissertation on the Wandering Jew.  Marjorie’s sister, Holly/Chava, to whom she used to be very close, converted to Orthodox Judaism when she married a man from the obscure Berukhim sect, and there has been a rift between the sisters ever since.  Marjorie desperately wants to feel close to Holly/Chava again, but she doesn’t like her sister’s husband, Nathan.  When she discovers that their grandfather concealed important parts of his past, Marjorie embarks on a quest to discover the truth, hoping that the information she finds will help her reconcile with her sister.

This isn’t really an academic novel.  Marjorie’s status as a grad student is important because her personal quest connects to her academic work, but the story centers on family and folk tales.  I really appreciated how positive the novel was about literary study, though.  At one point, Marjorie thinks, “Theory was killing literature, people said, but it had allowed me to see a whole subterranean world: every text meant something profound, if you would only follow it into the dark” (63).  The texts she follows into the dark aren’t literary classics but her grandfather’s notebooks, which contain stories of a magical White Rebbe, but Marjorie nonetheless uses her analytical skills to discover the stories’ meaning.  She also meets and dates a librarian who is working on a digital map of the Jewish diaspora, and digital humanities wind up being crucial to the plot.

For the most part, this is a very good story about family, especially the relationship between sisters.  There are some elements of fantasy; Feldman writes squarely in the magical realist tradition.  In some books, this bugs me, but I was able to accept the fantastic elements of The Angel of Losses without much difficulty.  The novel also deals with some fairly obscure aspects of Judaism, but Feldman handles these pretty well.  Marjorie isn’t Jewish, and since we follow the story mostly from her perspective, we discover what she discovers and learn alongside her.  Overall, this is an accessible, enjoyable novel, and I recommend it.