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JEW

by D.O. Dodd

JEW, the third novel by D.O. Dodd, is a disturbing and enigmatic account of identity, gender, and genocide. Dodd recontextualizes seemingly familiar historical atrocities to create an aesthetically challenging, profoundly disconcerting narrative.

The novel begins with a man regaining consciousness in a mass grave with no memory of his identity. Once free from the tangle of bodies, he conveniently happens upon the body of another man who appears to be his double. Leaving the gravesite dressed in the second man’s uniform, carrying his weapon, and driving his sedan, the protagonist rejoins the living as the commander of a village under occupation in what seems to be a religious war. Shortly after he arrives, he saves a woman who is assaulted by soldiers and learns that she knows him intimately, or thinks she does. The protagonist’s relationship with this woman – based on remnants of a shared history overshadowed by horrific violence – becomes the focus of the cryptic, circular narrative.

The novel’s prose is spare; dialogue is sparse and often aphoristic. Though the plot is well-paced, the conundrums it poses are difficult to solve. The same questions of identity and recognition that perplex the novel’s nameless characters perplex the reader as well. The setting remains temporally and geographically ambiguous. Despite the novel’s title, there are scant references to Judaism. The few that do appear are accompanied by references to Islam, which suggests that the novel’s context is not the historical Holocaust, but an allegorical amalgam of religiously motivated acts of violence.

The sexual exploitation of the oppressed – which includes humiliation, rape, and necrophilia – is the most unsettling aspect of this novel. Women are routinely assaulted by occupying male soldiers who revel in their dominance. The novel’s depiction of sexual abjection, the doppelgänger motif, and the book’s moral complexity call to mind Albert Sánchez Piñol’s gothic horror novel Cold Skin.

Dodd takes great aesthetic risks. JEW’s surrealism and compelling symbolism make its violence difficult to contextualize, which renders it much more discomfiting. Though the novel will inevitably upset and confound, it is also indisputably thought-provoking.

 

Reviewer: Devon Code

Publisher: Exile Editions

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 176 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-55096-143-0

Released: April

Issue Date: 2010-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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