About the Novel

The Nature of Blood is the sixth novel by Carribean author Caryl Phillips. Published in 1997, the novel was defined as "an extraordinary perceptive and intelligent novel, and a haunting one" by the New York Times.

The novel develops four storylines, each set in a different location- Venice, Germany, Cyprus, London - and in a different historical time - from the Early Modern Period to contemporary age.

• Opening and closing the novel is the narrative of Stephan Stern, a Jewish man who has left Nazi Germany before deportations to the concentration camps started. 

He has abadoned a wife and a child in America so that he could help create an underground military force and found the new state of Israel. The novel opens on the island of Cyprus where the British army has set up refugees camps for those people who escaped war-raveged Europe and are trying to reach the promise land. Stephan is helping "those from the old world enter the new" (11). Amongst the refugees there is Moshe, a boy of Romanian origins ready to take part in the Hagganah. At the end of the novel, set in present day Israel, Stephan is an old lonely man living outside Tel Aviv. In a dance club he meets Malka, a young woman who has left her home country, Ethiopia, and is now an unemployed nurse in Israel living with her parents and her sister: despite Stephan's fight for a land where all Jews could feel at home, people like Malka are made to feel an outcast because of their ethnicity. an outcast because of their ethnicity. 

• Eva's story is superimposed on that of Ann Frank's and her family - both Anne's and Eva's sister is called Margot - as told in Diary of a Young Girl. 

Eva Stern - Stephan's niece - is a twenty-one German Jew who survivers the Holocaust. Her narrative is the longest in the novel and it covers her life, from her youth in the mid-1930s, to her deportation to the Bergen-Bersen extermination camp, to her liberation in 1945 by the British army, and eventually to her suicide. These events, however, are not presented in a chronological order: the narration of her liberation and of the following events is constantly interrupted by recollections from her past.

Before the introduction of antisemitic laws, Eva lived with her parents and her sister Margot in a four-storey house. Of his time Eva remembers one episode in particular: the visiting of Stephan, her uncle - her father's brother - who urged Eva's father to leave Germany and join him in the fight for a new Jewish land in the East. Eva's father, Ernst, had however refused, claiming that he already had a home. 

At sixteen, Eva was made to leave her house and move to the ghetto area of the city with her parents while her sister Margot was sent into hiding. Margot spent eigtheen months hiding but she was eventually discovered and deported. During the two years Eva spent in the tiny apartment in the ghetto, she made friends with her neighbour Rosa, a woman in her mid-twenties, who committed suicide when the Jews were ordered to evacuate the area. 

At eighteen, Eva was deported to Bergen-Bersen with her parents. She was separated from her father and her mother died soon after. Eva was made to be part of the Nazi's Sonderkommand, the squad charged with burning bodies. 

After being liberated by the British army, Eva is taken to the Dispersed People Camp. Here Eva asks a soldier named Gerry, who had previously approached her and shown his concern for her well-being, to help her locate her sister Margot although the endeavour seems impossibile. Not knowing what to make of her future or where to go, Eva starts to construct a fantasy world where her mother is still alive and where the two of them make plans to leave together and rebuild their family. Eva becomes more and more withdrawn, locking herself in her hut and refusing to speak with the doctors. Gerry's sudden marriage proposal could be yet another of Eva's delusions: while the other women plans to head to Palestine, she prepares to leave for London after allegedly receiving a letter from the man. Once she arrives and locates Gerry, however, she discovers he is already married. After hearing the man's justifications, Eva is left alone in a foreign country and opts not to speak anymore. In the psychiatric hospital where she is taken doctors are unable to help her. Haunted by a doubled version of herself - "She followed me across the water" (197) and unable to cope, she commits suicide as preannounced by an encyclopedic entry on the voice "suicide" (186). 

• The narrative of the Jews of Portobuffole - whose source is Salomone G. Radzik's Portobuffole (1984) - is the only one not told in the first-person and it assumes a chronicle form. 

The story begins in March 1480 and is set in the small town of Portobuffole, then part of the Most Serene Republic's territory. The Jewish community settled in Portobuffole had been expelled from Cologne in Germany. Its leaders - Servadio, Moses and Giacobbe - are accused of having sacrificed a young Christian boy, a passing vagabond, and used his blood for their ritual sacrifices. Because of the local Christian community's rising hostility, Andrea Dolfin - the Venice representative in Portobuffole - has the Jews arrested and tortured to obtain a confession before the trial. The guilty verdict, however, is met with disapproval by the Grand Council of Venice which is trying to defend the economical interests of the Repuplic by allowing Jewish community to reside in its territories and practise money-landing. It is only after Dolfin's embellished and exaggerated account of the crime that the Council of Ten decides that the Jews of Portobuffole should submit to a second trial in Venice. Servadio, Moses and Giacobbe are again found guilty and sentenced to death. They are burned in St Mark Square with a public diplay. 

• The central storyline of the novel can be considered as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello. 

Firstly, the military general who is summoned by Venice in order to stop the threat of the Ottoman Empire bears a striking resemblance to the title character of the play. Secondly, the events narrated constitute a prequel to the events of the tragedy. An encyclopedia entry (166) cites both Sheakespare's Othello, and Shakespeare's source, Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi. The entire narrative is narrated in the first-person. The section opens with the wedding night between the general and an unnamed Venetian lady indentifiable with Desdemona - "She sleeps peacefully" (106) - and then retrocedes to narrate Othello's arrival in Venice, his relationships with the Venetians, the meeting with senator Barbantio, the wooing of Desdemona; until the narration finally rejoins its starting point. Othello is, therefore, given narrative power to tell his story and to comment on Venetian society from his point of view. New details contribute to define this character, such as the fact that he has abandoned a wife and a son to persue his military career. His thoughts point to his feelings of inadequacy in relation to European civilization (107) (119) but also to the pride for his origins (127 ). His longing to be accepted (122) and integrated in society clashes with the hostility some Venetians shows him and the loneliness he is made to feel. Moreover, his narration reveals the contradictions within a society which, while priding itself on the hospitality shown to foreigners, seems to be more interested in the political and economic services they can provide than in cultural diversity. The general's visit to the Jewish ghetto is proof of this. The courting of Desdemona is very brief and the rushed wedding opens for the general the prospect of a new home in Venice. The section ends in Cyprus where the general has been sent to fight the enemy and where he awaits for his new life to begin. Here the narration terminates without giving indications on how the story will play out. There is, however, a unidentified voice which interjects to reprimand the general for forgetting about his past and to incite him to go back home. "Peel your rusty body from hers and go home" (183). 

Despite being apparently four separate units, the storylines constitute a reading that aquire sense only in the total sum of its parts: the stories continually intersect and address each other through parallels between characters and are united by shared themes of discrimination, loss of identity, search for home.

PHILLIPS, C. (1997) The Nature of Blood. Vintage Books

Martina Cincotto