Rating: 
Summary: For the self-analyzing, romantic 'thinker' in all of us
Review: Another reviewer put it perfectly- this book isn't for everyone.I found "Be My Knife" completely by accident one day while I was looking for something interesting and unique to read. The description on the back cover made me pick it up (and not put it down). Though I became frustrated at times, wishing the story would progress more quickly, I'm glad I didn't give up. The end was definitely worth the wait. If you like analytical brain-candy, give this book a try. I haven't read anything else by the author, but if I come across another DAVID GROSSMAN title, I'll be sure to grab it fast!
Rating:
Summary: For the self-analyzing, romantic 'thinker' in all of us
Review: Another reviewer put it perfectly- this book isn't for everyone. I found "Be My Knife" completely by accident one day while I was looking for something interesting and unique to read. The description on the back cover made me pick it up (and not put it down). Though I became frustrated at times, wishing the story would progress more quickly, I'm glad I didn't give up. The end was definitely worth the wait. If you like analytical brain-candy, give this book a try. I haven't read anything else by the author, but if I come across another DAVID GROSSMAN title, I'll be sure to grab it fast!
Rating: 
Summary: Haunting and memorable
Review: Certainly not the easiest novel to get into, but with time and effort, "Be My Knife" packs an emotional punch that stays with the reader long after the last page has been turned. The narrative develops at a pace not unlike a snowball, gathering in intensity as it progresses ... and the final image burns itself deep into the reader's consciousness.
A love story between two ordinary people (told only through impassioned letters) dealing with loss, disillusionment, and the everyday. "Be My Knife" haunts...
Rating: 
Summary: If it wasn't Grossman, it would get a 1 star
Review: I adore the books written by David Grossman. This is, to my mind, by far: the worst he's ever done. It was panned in other countries for good reason: It's absolutely juvenile and puerile and all the run on sentences that worked in See:Under Love do not work here, in a story about Nothing, one lonely guy's neuroses. So, I think it's his name, a great writer's name, that is selling this book. Not the content. It's awful.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring, pointless, and pretentious
Review: I read this to review it for a print publication. I kept wondering why the translators bothered to put it into English and why the publishers felt that it was worth the sacrifice of trees. I think it may have value as aversive therapy for compulsive readers.
Rating:
Summary: If you like Proust
Review: I've not read any Grossman before and I dislike much contemporary fiction. This book's not for everyone. But if you can get into the story of Albertine in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, then you can handle the intensity and intricacy (subtlety within overstatement) of BE MY KNIFE. The book never refers, I think, to computer communications, but the setup whereby an entire affair is conducted through the written word strongly suggests an online relationship. There is psychological depth here (as well as art) that superficial readers simply may not want...and (as in Proust) a lack of plot. I recommend it, however, for sheer emotional catharsis. The ending's problematic. There could not be any simple end to the emotions portrayed.
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Summary: You Never Had An Affair Like This - 'Be My Knife Indeed' !
Review: In 'Be My Knife' acclaimed novelist David Grossman parses in the deepest way imaginable into the lives of 'Yair' and 'Miriam' who begin an affair of and in words only - a true epistolary tour de force. If you like dense extraordinary imagery, daring and completely off-the-wall thoughts, even more daring and off-the-wall actions, then YOU will love this book and you will continue to come back to it and dip into it, long, long after you have finished it. And after you have finished it, you will be changed. And you will look at your own relationships differently perhaps, even at yourself differently. Whether you have ever had an affair or not. And then you will want to read all his other books that have this amazing style and lack of fear. I rate this ace reading.
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Summary: Cliche, anyone?
Review: My mother always told me you should read the first twenty pages of any novel to find out if it will be any good or not. However, after only fifteen pages of this book and a quick skim through the rest I have to say that I found it entirely unoriginal and disappointing. This novel fails to deliver even its premise (which should've sold itself)! Discriminating readers would do well to check it out from the library prior to purchasing.
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Summary: A wonderful and original novel
Review: Oh good, I thought, David Grossman has written a novel with an adult protagonist. Yeah--with an emotional age of 12.
Rating:
Summary: Strange.
Review: The "plot" of this novel is easy to summarize. Yair Einhorn, a 33-year-old, married man sees Miriam, a somewhat older woman, for five minutes at a party, never meets or talks to her, but instantly decides that she would be the perfect person to whom to bare his soul in letters. "We could be like two people who inject themselves with truth serum...I want to be able to say to myself, 'I bled truth with her. Be a knife for me,'" he says in his introductory letter to her. The first 2/3 of the book consists of Yair's long, self-analytical letters to Miriam, the rest of the novel consisting of Miriam's diary and a separate collage of their comments after the end of the correspondence.
Many readers will have a difficult time suspending disbelief as much as is necessary here to accept the basic premise of this novel--that a complete stranger can write a long, neurotic, and frighteningly personal letter to a woman who does not run away in terror and who, in fact, agrees to be his "knife." In this novel of words rather than actions, Yair says, early in his correspondence, "I never imagined that meeting a stranger's language could be as exciting as the first touch of her body," and he admits to feeling jealous when he finds, in newspapers and advertising, some of the same words Miriam has used in her letters. He also confesses that "something is building up...begging to burst out, something that will suffocate if it doesn't crack..." He admits that his emotional stability is "the size of a peanut." Still Miriam allows the correspondence to continue, even though his letters arrive without postmarks, hand delivered to her mailbox at work.
Self-conscious and, some would say, self-indulgent in the extreme, Yair's letters eventually begin to reveal factual information about his marriage and his child, in addition to his important inner child, which he hopes to rediscover through Miriam, and I found myself grabbing onto these morsels as a way to give some reality and perspective to his lengthy and sometimes repetitious self-analysis. Miriam's diary, on the other hand, is truly touching. Appearing 2/3 of the way through the book, it is a very moving story of a woman who, in addition to working, must also deal with a seriously ill 10-year-old child, a child who was once normal but who is now speechless, living in his own world, and subject to fits. The conclusion, a section called Rain, which comes after the end of the correspondence, is intense and very dramatic.
Though the book is thoughtful and well written, I found it difficult to care much about Yair, whose inner world and needs seem to be his only concern. Miriam, on the other hand, has very real and difficult problems in the outside world, all of them, it seems to me, more urgent than Yair's, yet, until her diary appears late in the book, we know little about her except a few nuggets we glean second-hand from Yair's letters. This is a very introspective novel requiring immense patience, a book which will undoubtedly reward some readers, while perhaps driving others to distraction. Mary Whipple
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