It is about a human being not a Hero. Review on A Stone for Danny Fisher - Harold Robbins

My mind had started to form a bleak image of Harold Robbins as a storyteller after reading two of his novels, The Adventurer and Never Leave Me. Both the novels were repetitive in their content, did not have any solid idea behind their making, at times downright cheap, devoid of emotions and feelings and largely as loose as a Bollywood flick. However after reading “A Stone for Danny Fisher” I could not believe that such a compelling emotional saga could be written by Harold Robbins.

The book is essentially about a Jewish boy, named Danny Fisher who has been illustrated as a very normal human being (very unlike Harold Robbins) whose decisions are governed by circumstances, who is not able to take decisions of his own free will rather he is forced to accept them and face their consequences.

The novel is at its most emotional in the second book when there is confrontation between the father and the son regarding the son having to box to earn money. The way it has been put by the author it seems so realistic that one tends to believe that the author is narrating the experiences of millions of households who are going through such dilemmas nowadays due to the generation gap in different contexts however.

However the novel is by far the best in the third novel where some of the tragic incidents narrated by the author hit one’s heart so hard that for the time being you begin to feel like Danny Fisher, live his life, feel his pain and hope to be happy some day. When this unison of the character and soul finally breaks you cannot help yourself but only feel sorry for Fisher and continue to read on.

The novel ends very subtly after solving the many mysteries that had been left unsolved during its course and the last couple of pages which contain philosophical views of the author about human existence, mortality and emotions really made a worthwhile reading.

The author’s characterization of Daniel Fisher was simply superb and although I felt that the other characters were under-utilized and ill-developed, I would not complain because it was after all a story of Daniel Fisher. I was pleasantly surprised that Robbins had not given much space to physical man-woman contact in this book unlike the other two that I read which were full of violence and sexual activities and did not have even 10% of the gripping story and plethora of emotions that this one had.

What Daniel Fisher did or didn't do, what he could have done and what he could not have are simply mere arguments rather than any statements of truth.We all make mistakes because we are all human.We all do things we are not supposed to do, say things we are not supposed to say but then that is life, that is existence, that is mortality and that eventually is humane.

Any comments/suggestions/opinions will always be welcome.

Thanks for reading this review.