Keith Meatto reviews Harold Abramowitz’s Not Blessed in NewPages. He begins by stating that “[t]he best writers tell the same story over and over again,” then goes on:

What distinguishes Not Blessed is the relentlessness of the repetition. The effect is one of déjà vu, like having a conversation with a trauma victim or someone who suffers from amnesia or dementia. From the way the narrator repeats sentences verbatim in multiple chapters, one senses that Abramowitz enjoys orienting and disorienting – if not intentionally frustrating – the reader. Taken as a whole, the stories form a mosaic that testifies to the power and limits of language and memory. (…) Not Blessed feels like an archetypal fairy tale, albeit a fractured one.

Read the full review at NewPages.