"The Next Man to Meet in Heaven": Mitch Album squeezes some of his bestseller

Mitch Album's sequel is blatantly more of the same, until it's hard to understand what else is needed. Still, an album always manages to keep you going. The reading is very accessible and uncomplicated, the idea is simple and the atmosphere it produces kind and pleasant

Recyclable but graceful. Mitch Album (Photo: PR)

Mitch Album (Photo: PR)

The preoccupation with life after death bothers us, but Mitch Album is even more disturbing. The process in which he accompanied Murray Schwartz and subsequently wrote "Tuesdays with Murray" led him to ponder the matter and write "The Five People to Meet in Paradise," which became another success of his night. In 2013, the album wrote a type of follow-up book, "The First Phone Call from Heaven," with more insights into life, death, and communication between them.

Why only a "type" of a sequel? Because the real sequel kept an album for "The Next Man to Meet in Heaven," which came out in 2018 and was recently translated by Drora Bellisha for the release of Meters. In the first book, as I recall, the maintenance man Eddie saved the girl Annie from the fall of a trailer and paid for it in his life. As the sky rose, he encountered five figures from his past. Annie, who became disabled as a result of the same accident, has since lived a very easy life, a moment after she got married in an unfortunate accident. Now Annie also rises to the sky, and like the man who saved her, she meets a figure from her past, followed by another and another.

Writers love to reproduce successful works (Patrick Modiano led this Nobel Prize), only that the case of an album approaches the scale of blatant category. The first tendency was to write that if you read "The Five People," you have no reason to read "The Next Man," too, it's simply the same thing, with an almost identical story structure. Still, an album always manages to keep you going. The reading is very accessible and uncomplicated, the idea is simple and the atmosphere it produces kind and pleasant. The main reason is quite prosaic - simply, if you read the previous one and loved it, 15 years later you get a reminder why. And if you haven't read? Well, here's the opportunity to enter the New Age world that an album has been successfully designing for over two decades.

"First Phone Call from Heaven" - Unless you drown in kitsch enjoy a surprising novel

In "Next Man" there are some nice twists and some light-hearted challenges, such as, for example, Annie's meeting with the doctor who saved her, whose character is based on a true story and a few events about which we are not told because of the spoiler. In general, he will be credited with an album that in most of his books he tries not to overpower (unusual is "Frankie Presto's magic strings," which I have not been able to connect with at all), so it serves the main purpose - to do some good on the soul with Feel Good books.

The album has a devout audience that will read it all, which is probably why this novel jumped to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Maybe the magic is in its packaging as a lightweight book, free of commitment, and if you've been waiting for "mourning" then here it comes. People love sentimentality and prefer the challenge to float over shallow water rather than delve into heavyweight dilemmas. The "Next Man" is made like a dessert in an American restaurant: wrapped in deep layers of sugar that actually prevents serious thought.

So how to relate to such a book? It depends on your point of view already. On a personal level, I was unimpressed that there was too much of it. Like all other Paradise books, the last of an album is a New Age pat on the soul. The insights are superficial, even if creative, and there is no way to see "The Next Man" as something that is beyond a flight book that can carry you two to three hours in the air. On the other hand, if you are looking for a bit of pan and nothing - this little novel might be the perfect solution for you.

"The Next Man to Meet in Heaven" / Mitch Album. From English: Drora Bellisha. Meter, 187 pages.