Caryl Phillips is a widely celebrated author. The Nature of Blood is one of his more obscure novels, as it is an experimental text. He weaves together the story of Eva Stern, a Holocaust survivor, and Othello, alongside many subplots. The intersection of these narratives is tenuous. Supposedly, Eva's story demands further exploration into Jewish history. Phillip's message, however complex, is that history repeats itself.
Effectively, Phillips tells the same story several times over. He's presenting Jewish figures, fictional and nonfictional, at various points in history, who become victims of racially motivated violence. He explores the tricky subject of stereotypes and their origins, as well as the question of identity.
While Eva is Jewish, she possesses little connection to her cultural heritage. Much less so after the war. In fact, her uncle decides to join the movement to rebuild Israel, but he experiences his own crisis of identity within the movement because he, like Eva, doesn't identify with Jewish culture but with European culture. His heritage, however, is Jewish. Identity, then becomes a focus of construction in and of itself, parallel to the narrative of the rebuilding of Israel.
