The Lover

Rating:
Summary: War creates disequilibrium
Review: A teacher of history, a daughter, a garageman for a husband, and a lover serve to inhabit the beginning of the story. The lover goes to war, it is October 1973, and is missing. The garageman looks for him, his wife's lover. The daughter is sleepless at night. She leaves the house and walks.

The teacher is ferociously efficient. She cooks batches of food for the family, she corrects papers, writes tests, is enrolled in a doctorate program, attends teachers' meetings, cleans the house aggressively. As children in school her husband got answers from children who got answers from her. This Israeli novel is an outstanding work. Each character tells the story in third or first person narrative and things move along, although there is some time shifting, some use of flashback to bring in the back story and to make things interesting. The author uses considerable parallelism. For instance, there are three lovers in the end, not just the one of the title, the trigger of action, Gabriel.

Adam's garage was flourishing. It had become a rather large business, mostly through the efforts of his business partner. At one time it had some thirty Arab workmen employed there. Asya, the teacher, learned to drive a car at her husband's behest. The couple has a son. He is healthy, but deaf. He uses a hearing aid and because he is bothered by noises in his head, his father crafts a switch-off feature. Unfortunately he has used the feature when he crosses a street to join a friend at play and is hit by a car. The child, age five, dies. Later on the couple has a daughter, Dafna. When Adam sat shiva for his son Yigal he did not shave his beard. When Dafi is small she is fascinated with his beard. Notwithstanding her advent, Adam feels immensely sad. He believes that the couple should have divorced at that point, but they continued together, although estranged.

An old Morris car is brought by Gabriel into Adam's garage. The engine is rusted and spiders surround it. Gabriel has come from France to see his old grandmother. The car belongs to his grandmother. The car is fixed and the bill is beyond the means of Gabriel to pay. In fact he is starving. Adam assists him to get a job. Gabriel's close connection to Asya is discovered by Dafi. It is two months after the war and no Gabriel Arditi has surfaced. Na'im is one of the Arab workers in the garage. He is sent to Adam's house on an errand. Later he goes there on his own. His brother is a terrorist who planted a bomb at the university, but Na'im claims that the person is only a distant cousin.

Adam ends up hiring Na'im to help look for Gabriel. Also, Na'im stays with Gabriel's grandmother. In the course of the night time journeys a towing service is started. The condition of the people involved in the accidents requiring the towing of the vehicles begins to haunt Adam. Adam senses he has a compulsion to look for a man who has disappeared. Adam falls in love with a friend of Dafi. Na'im and Dafi become involved with each other. Gabriel has traveled to the desert to the front and then is taken in by some religious Jews.

The novel is rich and colorful. It is written in a realistic, psychologically astute manner.

Rating:
Summary: War creates disequilibrium
Review: A teacher of history, a daughter, a garageman for a husband, and a lover serve to inhabit the beginning of the story. The lover goes to war, it is October 1973, and is missing. The garageman looks for him, his wife's lover. The daughter is sleepless at night. She leaves the house and walks.

The teacher is ferociously efficient. She cooks batches of food for the family, she corrects papers, writes tests, is enrolled in a doctorate program, attends teachers' meetings, cleans the house aggressively. As children in school her husband got answers from children who got answers from her. This Israeli novel is an outstanding work. Each character tells the story in third or first person narrative and things move along, although there is some time shifting, some use of flashback to bring in the back story and to make things interesting. The author uses considerable parallelism. For instance, there are three lovers in the end, not just the one of the title, the trigger of action, Gabriel.

Adam's garage was flourishing. It had become a rather large business, mostly through the efforts of his business partner. At one time it had some thirty Arab workmen employed there. Asya, the teacher, learned to drive a car at her husband's behest. The couple has a son. He is healthy, but deaf. He uses a hearing aid and because he is bothered by noises in his head, his father crafts a switch-off feature. Unfortunately he has used the feature when he crosses a street to join a friend at play and is hit by a car. The child, age five, dies. Later on the couple has a daughter, Dafna. When Adam sat shiva for his son Yigal he did not shave his beard. When Dafi is small she is fascinated with his beard. Notwithstanding her advent, Adam feels immensely sad. He believes that the couple should have divorced at that point, but they continued together, although estranged.

An old Morris car is brought by Gabriel into Adam's garage. The engine is rusted and spiders surround it. Gabriel has come from France to see his old grandmother. The car belongs to his grandmother. The car is fixed and the bill is beyond the means of Gabriel to pay. In fact he is starving. Adam assists him to get a job. Gabriel's close connection to Asya is discovered by Dafi. It is two months after the war and no Gabriel Arditi has surfaced. Na'im is one of the Arab workers in the garage. He is sent to Adam's house on an errand. Later he goes there on his own. His brother is a terrorist who planted a bomb at the university, but Na'im claims that the person is only a distant cousin.

Adam ends up hiring Na'im to help look for Gabriel. Also, Na'im stays with Gabriel's grandmother. In the course of the night time journeys a towing service is started. The condition of the people involved in the accidents requiring the towing of the vehicles begins to haunt Adam. Adam senses he has a compulsion to look for a man who has disappeared. Adam falls in love with a friend of Dafi. Na'im and Dafi become involved with each other. Gabriel has traveled to the desert to the front and then is taken in by some religious Jews.

The novel is rich and colorful. It is written in a realistic, psychologically astute manner.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent and original
Review: A well done "fresco" of contradictions in the Israelian society. Each protagonist is part of the Israel complexity. A simple and a little surreal story in a difficult history. Great book.

Rating:
Summary: The Best book I have read in years.
Review: A. B Yehoshua has written his masterpiece. The characters seem to come to life in his writing. This book captures so much of the political chaos and yet it does it in a reverant and kind way. My two favorite characters were Dafna and Adam. They were so full of love and kindness. I read this book two months ago and can't seem to get it out of my head. It is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent and original
Review: In a most unusual storyline, a man searches for his wife's lover in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the meantime, early tension of the Jewish state is plumbed: Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi, man vs. woman, Arab vs. Jew. Told from constantly oscillating viewpoints in the spirit of Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying*, Yehoshua presents a hyperrealistic portrait of modern-day Israel.

Rating:
Summary: an extraordinary book one of the best contemporary novelists
Review: Not only is it a startlingly humane, nuanced and difficult portrait of Israel, by an Israeli, but one of the most profound explorations of humanity in its daily round of work and thought I have read.

Rating:
Summary: My favorite Israeli Novel
Review: This novel, written shortly after the disastrous Yom Kippur war, captures the complexity of Israeli society through the lives of normal participants.

Rather than lambaste the reader with a litany of politics, the book follows the slightly bizarre, but highly symbolic life of an Israeli family as they attempt to find the Wife's lover - a lapsed Jew from France who returned seeking an inheritance.

The story is unpretentious and surprisingly readable. The author's style is to present each new chapter through the voice of a different character, often retelling the same events from several perspectives.

Through these perspectives - a wealthy secular mechanic, a conflicted rebellious teenage girl, an aging zionist intellectual wife, an elderly native sephardic, a ambitious intelligent palestinian boy, and ultimately through the story of the Lover himself - Yehoshua uncovers the complex stuff that constitutes a very strangely formed nation.

Nuanced, delightfully blasphemous accounts of Zionism like this one are not permitted to be spoken here in the US - but of course in Israel, sophisticated debates about the nature of their society are part and parcel of intellectual life.

Enjoy this book. I give it my highest recommendation.