The city of orphaned parents in Falling out of time, by David Grossman

Abstract

David Grossman, one of the greatest exponents of contemporary world literature, constructs in Nofel michutz lazman (2011) a city exclusively inhabited by parents grieving the death of their children. Published in Brazil as Fora do tempo (2012), all the characters are men and women who, both individually and collectively, experience the pain of an inverse orphanhood, since mourning does not result from the natural movement of the departure of older loved ones, but rather from the farewell to young dead children. This article therefore proposes an interpretative analysis with a critical bias on this book by the Israeli author that thematizes the lack of children as capable of occupying all spaces in life. In dialogue with other literary and theoretical texts of the present day, the article seeks to consider the paths of aestheticization of mourning, given that the writer´s own condition is that of an “orphan father” since he lost his son in a military incursion into Lebanon in 2006.