Author Dror Mishani on World ShadowNovember 11, 2013

Dror Mishani the author of the international best seller, award winning “The Missing File” in an evening about “World Shadow”.

World Shadow is a marvelous and revolutionary novel that in its greatest moments refuses to accept the world as it is and as we “already” know it – but rather starts to read as a text on the verge of what the world is ‘no longer’ but ‘could be’ and ‘might some day be’.

This dimension which is beyond “knowing the world” opens up in the novel mainly due to the process of repentance that its two main characters go through.

Gabriel Mantsur from Jerusalem changes during the novel, so much so that in the end of the novel he is no longer the same man; he drifts away from the business world and the financial world due to his decline in them but also because he undergoes a deep transformation, so deep that in the end he supports the strike.

Like Gabriel, Daniel Kay also undergoes an ideological transformation which brings him not only to betray his ex-co workers at MSV but to even join the strikers.

Through Daniel Kay, Gabriel Mantzur and the group of young strikers – the world as we know it is on the verge of repentance and comes closer to a real change. The truly fascinating things is that this also happened in Baram’s novel Good People – so much so that even in that historical novel Baram created the feeling that if the two main characters dare just a bit more they’ll be able to minimize the disastrous effects of the war that already happened.

In World Shadow this feeling is even stronger because while reading this seemingly realistic novel, a novel that knows the world better than any other Israeli novel, you feel that turning the page will make the world different.

In its liberating moments World Shadow is not written in the present tense of “knowing the world”, also not in future tense (utopian time), but rather in a unique tense that lays between a familiar present and a yet unknown future. A tense or a time that could be named “the time which is forming now” (a line from World Shadow, page 402). And this tense continuously asks the readers: which time do you want it to be?

To the full lecture –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_olsPleHG0