[Heavy Sand] grips one instantly. The vivid, multicolored pictures from the life of a little town in the Ukraine, the morals and manners of the Jewish craftspeople, the freedom and humor of narration … (p. 91)

The "homey" style of narration about life as it goes on ultimately creates a disintegrative effect, as between what is and what is to be. Between a life that prospers and its destruction …

In Heavy Sand the author does not analyze or philosophize. He puts facts in our hands…. But there is no fatiguing descriptiveness. It is simply that Rybakov is always in the realm of practical existence, and for him an emphasized "tangibility" is apparently a means of avoiding subjectivism. (p. 92)

It is as though the very concept of the novel is dredged up out of the mass of minor details of which life is made up, literally as out of some heavy...