Falling Out of Time (Hebrew: Nofel MiChutz LaZman) was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in 2011 and translated into English by Jessica Cohen in 2014 (published by Alfred A. Knopf). The work was written after the death of Grossman’s son Uri in 2006 and is an explicit attempt to find a form adequate to the experience of losing a child.
The work’s form is unprecedented: it is written partly in prose, partly in verse, partly as stage directions, and partly as dialogue. The characters are archetypal rather than realistic — “the Walking Man,” “the Net Mender,” “the Midwife,” “the Centaur,” “the Duke” — and they are identified by their relationship to grief rather than by individual psychology. One by one, they leave their village and join a procession toward “There” — the place of the dead, the unreachable country where their children have gone.
The processional structure draws on ancient mourning traditions — the walking procession, the communal lament, the repetitive chanting that is grief’s natural rhythm. Grossman combines these with modernist literary experiment: the text’s shifting between verse and prose, between dialogue and narration, between the realistic and the archetypal, creates a form that mimics grief’s own unpredictable movements between numbness, intensity, language, and silence.
The work’s central question is whether language can reach the dead — whether words, sufficiently precise and sufficiently desperate, can bridge the gap between the living and the gone. Grossman does not answer this question; he performs the attempt.
Collecting Falling Out of Time
First edition English (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good/very good: $5–$15