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    A Mad Desire to Dance
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    A Mad Desire to Dance
    Unavailable
    A Mad Desire to Dance
    Audiobook9 hours

    A Mad Desire to Dance

    Written by Elie Wiesel

    Narrated by Mark Bramhall and Kirsten Potter

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A searing exploration of a man haunted by the horrors of the twentieth century, a man who feels he must be going mad but who finds a way out of the darkness.

    Doriel is a European transplanted to New York who carries with him a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a resistance leader, survives the war but dies in a car crash with her husband soon afterward. Doriel’s longing for his parents, and a longing to know his family’s secrets, haunts him and denies him the chance for happiness or intimacy with women. The intense study of Judaism offers him no solace; to the contrary, he comes to believe he is haunted by a dybbuk. His visits to Israel land him in anti-Zionist enclaves where only the coming of the Messiah is important.

    A child during the war, all he knows of the Holocaust comes from movies, newsreels, and books. But it is enough. Five years of psychoanalysis brings him to a crossroads. Finally he comes to grips with his mother’s secret — a wartime affair — and the process triggers in him a new understanding that only love can heal the most intimate of wounds.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 17, 2009
    ISBN9780739382073
    Unavailable
    A Mad Desire to Dance
    Author

    Elie Wiesel

    Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in the town of Sighet, now part of Romania. During World War II, he, with his family and other Jews from the area, were deported to the German concentration camps, where his parents and younger sister perished. Wiesel and his two older sisters survived. Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 by advancing Allied troops, he was taken to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist. In 1958, he published his first book, La Nuit, a memoir of his experiences in the concentration camps. He has since authored nearly thirty books, some of which use these events as their basic material. In his many lectures, Wiesel has concerned himself with the situation of the Jews and other groups who have suffered persecution and death because of their religion, race or national origin. He has been outspoken on the plight of Soviet Jewry, on Ethiopian Jewry and on behalf of the State of Israel today. Wiesel made his home in New York City, and became a United States citizen. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University, a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City College of New York, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University where he taught 'Literature of Memory.' Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980 - 1986, Wiesel served on numerous boards of trustees and advisors. He died in 2016.

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    Reviews for A Mad Desire to Dance

    4/5

    36 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I will always remember seeing Elie Wiesel speak in person when I was at university. For a Holocaust survivor, he was remarkably filled with the essence of hope in the human spirit. He had a sense of the world that was baffling from where I sat after what he had been through but there was a definite wholehearted wisdom there that I wanted to believe in.

      The main character of this novel, Doriel, is not a Holocaust survivor himself but was a child and lived through being hid and then after having to cope with the death of siblings and parents. He carries a tumultuous weight and most of his inner soul is explored through sessions with his psychiatrist, whose parents also survived the Holocaust but don't want to talk about it. More than anything, the book explores madness and also interestingly enough missed chances in love. Though I am not Jewish, I found myself relating quite a bit to Doriel's musings on madness and the state of the world. He feels he is possessed by a Dybbuk and he fights against a true healing. Or course, Wiesel wouldn't be himself if he couldn't interject his own sense of philosophy in.

      This book is rich with riddle and story, of life choices and memories examined and re-examined. It is interesting in its examination of religion and the soul, of it's relationship with God and the human language.

      Favorite Quotes:

      pg 5 "But who is to say whether guilt and madness are compatible or incompatible? And who decided that I'm not entitled to both madness and despair? That madmen are beyond redemption, thus hopelessly condemned, except in the privileged area of art? Van Gogh before dying, whispered "Sadness will last forever." Sadness. No. Madness lasts much longer."

      pg 7 "And the heavy breasted woman said to him: 'It is not you we are taking away, but years off your life; we';; sell them at the market." ... "We're in a theater, we're putting on a play about madness. It's a world overrun by madness. Everyone has a part. And so do you. You can choose: you can be the executioner or the condemned man."

      pg 12 "The truth is there is no truth."

      pg 43 "Sometimes, always unexpectedly, a word vanishes; it's impossible to recapture it, for it has already become a face. And this face, stunningly beautiful and fascinatingly ugly, at once young and decrepit, coarse and majestic, enjoys attracting and repelling me, and I say to myself, laughing and crying: it is the face of a god struck by the madness of demons and the madman is me."

      pg 54 "Is e just suffering from a pathological nostalgia for a lost paradise, filched by strangers?"

      pg 78 "You live only your life, whereas I inhabit the lives of others. Like a novelist, a madman is embodied in several characters simultaneously. He is Caesar and Cicero, Socrates and Plato, Moses and Joshua. True, you have to allow for consciousness and the imaginary. Don't bring it up , please. I have both. But between yours and mine, there is an abyss"

      pg. 135 "You and your stories...You know too many of them; you become attached to them; they've already imprisoned you. Eventually, they'll be the ruin of you. Stories are dangerous; even the most beautiful come with arrows, and you don't know that you're the target."

      pg. 163 "When a soul is involved, one should be able to break into it gently. With the proper word. A gesture, a sign, a look. A handshake. A silent pause, why not?"

      pg. 181 "What meaning can be drawn from a sentence that is necessarily devoid of meaning? But, on the other hand, could the absence of meaning have some other meaning? And what about the ever-changing layout of words? Sometimes a comma travels: it runs, runs between the words, and is impossible to catch. Is the comma insane too?"

      pg. 216 : "...human beings have migraines, whereas history undergoes convulsions."

      pg, 235 "But writing has an animus towards me. To write, though you have to love words, they also have to love you. Mine scoff at me. As soon as I choose one, ten others spring up and chase it away."
      The poet smiled and said, "The opposite happens to me. Ten words turn up before me, because of the richness of my language but I just want one. And that one often stays hidden."


      pg. 237 "Admittedly, more than once, on many occasions, upon meeting a young woman with a voice I liked, I could have started a family. Each time, almost at the last minute, I retreated in fear. U said to myself: I;m not ready, not yet ready to express my trust in man and his humaneness. Not ready to say to the world: I believe in you and in those who mold you: I want to participate in your undertaking and be included in your future. Not ready to give the world my children doomed beforehand."

    • 4/5
      This was a difficult book to get into and also to work through, but, ultimately, it was satisfying. As usual, Elie Wiesel reaches back into his personal experience of the emotions of time of the Holocaust in Europe and brings these to life in his novel. The story begins with Doriel, a Polish man who is a Holocaust survivor, on an extended rant. Is it because he is “mad”? Most of the rest of the book deals with Doriel’s encounters with Therese Goldschmidt, his Freudian psychoanalyst, who tries to make that determination. Throughout the book, we learn about the bits and pieces that have been the whole of Doriel’s life. When Doriel’s therapist gets too close to the truths of his life, he responds with angry outbursts. In the course of his therapy sessions, we learn about Doriel’s parents and that his mother had been a much respected partisan fighter. We find out what happened to his brother and sister. In addition, we begin to question if the relationships he describes with women were even real and wonder why he tended to be a loner. This is a book that takes a bit of work. You may, like I did, feel that the ending was a bit too rushed and contrived. Nevertheless, the book is meaty, and, if you have the time to delve into it deeply, you’ll find much to like within its pages.
    • 5/5
      Wiesel has disdurbed me with his profound writings since I was but a child. Assuredly, he is one of the very best commentators on the Holocaust. He was there. This latest narration concerns his Dyybuk, his therapist and Madness. And who better to listen to than Wiesel? To boot , I am listening to the CD with a superb performance by Mark Bramhall and Kirsten Potter!
    • 4/5
      Like any other Wiesel book, this is well worth reading. Don't be put off by the philosophy-student-at-2am first 50pp. Chapter 3, starting on p51, begins a different phase of the book and it's a much less claustrophobic experience after that.Wiesel is justly famous for the memoir "Night". He's not a novelist, frankly, and a less talented writer would have turned this same story into the literary equivalent of waterboarding. Things like, "At times, in an involuntary and unpredictable way, everything spins around and becomes dislocated in my mind. At the slightest little thing, and often for no apparent reason, I weep without shedding tears and I roar with laughter. I'm lonely, terribly lonely, though a crowd surrounds me and hems me in{,}" are...well...clunky, to put it kindly. (That is from p140, the beginning of chapter 12.)But...and here's the thing...there are passages that soar and look down at us, seeing sharp edges and stark corners where we see fuzz, mist, and shadows: "Against a world invaded by madness, should we use the faith of our ancestors, or our own madness?" (p110) And this is a simple throwaway line in a long dialogue paragraph!I can almost forgive the non-novel-ness of the book for moments like that. I recommend the book to readers of Robert Pirsig's philosophical maunderings as a corrective, and to readers of Wiesel's own memoir as an act of solidarity with a man whose world contains so much that he can't keep it in, gotta let it out (to quote Stephen Georgiou/Cat Stevens).
    • 5/5
      Another True GemJust a wonderfully written book about love, trauma, inescapable memories of the Shoah, and Freudian psychoanalysis mixed in for good measure. The French-to-English translation of Elie Wiesel's writing is terrific, one can only imagine how good it is in the vernacular.To be sure, the book's non-linear structure is difficult to read at times, especially the incoherent ramblings of a disturbed old man in the first 50 or so pages. But the story comes together nicely with a interesting twist at the end. There is quite a bit of Freudian philosophy here, so if you're not quite up to date with it, you might want to keep the Internet handy.Overall, I found "A Mad Desire to Dance" highly engaging, all-engrossing, and wonderfully written. Sure to be another Elie Wiesel classic.