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<\/figure>translated from the Hebrew by Ira Moskowitz<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n original publication (in Hebrew): 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n this edition: St. Martin’s Press, 2018<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n grab a copy here<\/a> or through your local independent bookstore or library<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n “First of all, you are secret agents…Your existence is regular and continuous, like any human being…with the help of the tools you receive in this course, you’ll understand the way in which cause and effect operate in this world and how to exploit this understanding in order to create small and nearly imperceptible events that help people come to life-changing decisions. Clear?” (57)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus begins just one of the speeches that the General gives to his latest class of coincidence makers (Eric, Emily, and Guy) as he initiates them into their new roles. They’re not Imaginary Friends (at least, Guy isn’t anymore) and they’re not one of the other kinds of invisible creatures that control our universe. Rather, they are responsible for the complex, minute, and apparently very important actions that change people’s lives. Eric, Emily, and Guy are going to help boring people become poets, lonely people fall in love, and scientists make new, world-changing discoveries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The premise is an interesting one, and Blum does a good job carrying it all through all 287 pages, developing Emily and Guy’s characters, as well as that of a hit man who never actually kills anyone himself…We learn that Emily has fallen in love with Guy, but the latter is still hung up on someone he fell in love with back when he was a young boy’s Imaginary Friend. Guy has started getting bored with Coincidence Making, though he enjoys “continuous existence,” something he didn’t have before. Notable is the fact that Blum leaves vague this question of what exactly are<\/em> these Coincidence Makers? Are they angels? Some sort of creatures woven into the complex fabric of the universe that pull the strings? They act and look human but they…aren’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What’s especially interesting about this book to this reader is how it brought up connections in my mind to several other fantastic works in translation published within the last decade. Blum’s description of the course on Coincidence Making, which is led by a mysterious man known only as the General, who helps his students understand how to manipulate reality, is reminiscent of the dark fantasy trilogy Vita Nostra<\/em><\/a> by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (tr. Julia Meitov Hersey). One could say that The Coincidence Makers<\/em> is the lighter, sugary version of Vita Nostra<\/em>, since Blum’s novel doesn’t get down into how language manipulates and creates reality and certainly doesn’t have apocalyptic scenes of the fabric of reality breaking down. No, Blum is more interested in telling a love story, one that spans multiple types of existence. So while Emily and Guy are arranging coincidences for their poets or scientists, they are trying to navigate their own complex emotions about one another and what it means to fall in love as a near-human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scattered throughout the book are “nonfictional” excerpts from textbooks on Coincidence Making: histories of its practitioners, best practices, etc. Again, this calls to mind Vita Nostra<\/em>, with some of the mind-bending paragraphs taken from textbooks that ask students to manipulate impossible objects with their minds. Other SFT that does similar work includes Pedro Cabiya’s Wicked Weeds<\/em><\/a> (about a zombie who works for a pharmaceutical company) and Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun<\/em><\/a> (about a pepper so strong that it causes hallucinations). This flipping back and forth between fictional nonfiction and the fictional story adds an extra dimension to a book that is trying to convince us of the legitimacy of this world we don’t understand. Of course, we don’t understand it because we can’t see<\/em> it–it’s the characters who inhabit it in their special capacities (as half-humans, zombies, etc.) who learn from the texts in their reality-manipulation training. It’s actually ironic, isn’t it, that those learning how to manipulate reality must be taught<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blum seems to enjoy upending our understanding of history by listing some of the more astonishing coincidences and then attributing them to Coincidence Makers, such as a man named Baum: “Throughout his service–which still continues, according to many sources–Baum was responsible for some of the most complex and impressive coincidences in history, such as the mold in Alexander Fleming’s laboratory and the discovery of penicillin, organizing the discovery of electromagnetism, the discovery of X-rays, and organizing a window of time in which a storm began to die down, allowing the invasion of Normandy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, does it matter if coincidences are random or seemingly random? The fact that Guy, Emily, and Eric are taking a course on Coincidence Making automatically suggests that the teacher of said course is much more sophisticated in the art than they are. And the allusions he drops to other Coincidence Makers, as well as the three students’ gossip about what they’ve heard outside of class, suggests that reality manipulation goes very deep, all the way up to those Coincidence Makers who are responsible for the most delicate and complicated coincidences that lead to human progress. Indeed, it seems as though these Coincidence Makers are all necessarily working for the good of humanity, as a matter of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Coincidence Makers<\/em> is ultimately a very readable, engaging novel. It further reveals more about the Israeli SFF scene and the kinds of Hebrew speculative fiction that is being translated into English, alongside the fantastical stories of Etgar Keret and the genre-bending work of Shimon Adaf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, I want to congratulate the translator, Ira Moskowitz, for his fluent, readable translation of this novel and also note that his name is not on the cover but buried in the copyright page. Publishers, of course, should put the translator’s name on the cover<\/em>, since the translated book we hold in our hands wouldn’t exist without the person who has used their talent and energy to bring it from one language into another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n translated from the Hebrew by Ira Moskowitz original publication (in Hebrew): 2011 this edition: St. Martin’s Press, 2018 grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library “First of all, you are secret agents…Your existence is regular and continuous, like any human being…with the help of the tools you receive in this<\/p>\n
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