The Logroller’s Waltz

In the summer of 2010 advance reading copies of the English translation of the Israeli author David Grossman’s acclaimed novel To the End of the Land began making the proverbial rounds. The publisher was hoping to secure pre-release blurbs—those words of lavish, unrestrained praise meant to suggest that, yes, this is a book worth buying. In this case, the de rigueur gushiness bubbled into sticky self-parody, thanks to a particularly effusive appraisal from the novelist Nicole Krauss:

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his...