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Review title: Disaffected, Existentialist Novel
Product review: With All Backs Were Turned, Hlasko's vision of life has become remarkably bleak. The novel churns with the inevitability of his (more famous) Eighth Day Of the Week and the pessimism of Killing The Second Dog (also set in Israel), but unfortunately in many places the dialogue seems to have eaten this novel. Consequently, it reads like a screenplay.But some people like reading screenplays, just as some people don't mind a pinch of pretension mixed in with their authentic, hard-won wisdom. Hlasko clearly had the latter in abundance: working as a pimp, being an exile, etc. This novel-- and Hlasko's work in general-- is important because it represents a unique crossroads of many disparate currents of 20th century literature. Only Hlasko examines the soul-killing effects of life under Communism, while capturing the nihilistic swoon of the Beats, the grit of hard-boiled crime fiction, and the openess and sense of urgency of existentialism. No one else.
