Yoram Kaniuk is a youngish Israeli novelist of enormous talent, both as an artificer of plot and as a virtuoso of language. He is an existentialist who writes somewhat in the manner of Camus, although his work shows a sophisticated awareness of many other writers and their special literary modes. On the basis of his first novel, The Acrophile … and to a lesser extent the new one, Himmo, one might argue that Kaniuk could some day—if he stays on the job—join the ranks of important world authors.

The Acrophile was a fantastically good story with all the verve, inventiveness, and assured mastery of idiom one expects from such writers as Amado, Borges, Queneau, Böll, and perhaps Nabokov. Even in translation the book showed literary craftsmanship on every page.

Kaniuk's existentialism, which in The Acrophile was of a wild, zany, carnival-of-the-emotions sort, is in Himmo a...