“We are thoughts, gestures, silences of God. Sometimes, in our dreams, we become His laughter.” Painter, aesthetician, and folklorist, but above all a monumental walker and labyrinthine storyteller, Julio Kaimi (1897-1982) was gifted early on for obscurity. Deaf, a former wealthy man and a stranger in flesh, he was thrown into a world where his reflections served no one.
His discomfort in the face of rampant modernity translates, in the eyes of the thoughtless modernizers, as an outdated localism. The universally folkish way he approached tradition undermines him in the normative aspirations of the Hellenocentric thinkers of the interwar period. Finally, his Kabbalistic mysticism and spontaneous anarchism marginalize him from the ambitions of both the introspective Jewish community and the doctrinaire left.
Michel Fais, sifting through biographical details of J. Kaimi, fragments from his clandestine work, and a diary (which essentially redistributes time), aims to speak about the rigorous art of life. “The Honey and Ashes of God” is a novel that does not fear kleptography (between the recorded and the invented), that does not hesitate to serve any narrative unity or fragmentariness, that does not shy away from sinking into the ashes of a serene destitution in order to taste the honey of a critical era and a narrative adventure.
“The Honey and Ashes of God” is the long, shattered fairy tale of a pariah of our spiritual history, who continuously challenges our collective delusions.
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