A whirlwind of art, music, and lust, Life on Sandpaper is Yoram Kaniuk's overwhelming autobiographical novel detailing his years as a young painter in the New York of the '50s. Wounded and alienated, a war veteran at the age of nineteen, Kaniuk arrives in Greenwich Village at its peak period of artistic creativity, and finds his way among such giants as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Sinatra. In terse prose, inspired by the associative and breathless drive of bebop, Kaniuk's memories race between the ecstatic devotion of his beloved Harlem jazz clubs, through the ideological spats of the dying Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, to the volcanic gush of passion, pain, art, dance, alcohol, and drugs that was Greenwich Village. Kaniuk's stories roll and tumble here with hypnotic urgency, as if this were his last opportunity to remember, and tell, before all is obliterated.

ヨラム・カニュクが描く本作は、記憶の断片をビバップの即興演奏のごとく衝突させた、狂騒の1950年代ニューヨークへの鎮魂歌です。19歳で戦争の傷を負った若き画家の魂が、グリニッジ・ヴィレッジの混沌と溶け合う様は、単なる回顧録の枠を超えた文学的衝撃を与えます。その文体は、まるでざらついた紙やすりで生の現実を削り出すような切迫感に満ち、読者の五感を激しく揺さぶります。 チャーリー・パーカーやデ・クーニングといった巨星たちが、神格化されることなく泥臭い実存として呼吸する筆致は圧巻です。消えゆくイディッシュ文化と剥き出しのジャズが交錯する中で、孤独な魂が救済を求める熱量は、読む者に「生きる痛み」と「描く悦び」を同時に突きつけます。全てが消え去る前に書き留めようとする切実な祈りこそが、本作を不朽の芸術へと昇華させているのです。