Rating: 
Summary: Identity Crisis
Review: I've been struggling with this book in conjunction with Mr Mani, as part of a paper on Sephardic identity in the writing of A B Yehoshua. Strangely, I find myself agreeing with both the positive and negative reviews - which strongly suggests that the book is a bit of a curate's egg, good in parts! As with Mr Mani, the historical detail is excellent. Even given the tedious nature of a narrative style with no dialogue, ABY succeeds in painting a tremendously powerful and engaging portrait of the Mediterranean and North European world of 999 AD, As an historical epic, if you can get past the boredom threshold somewhere around the middle of the book, it succeeds quite well. But ABY's forte is in the internal journey into the human psyche. Mr Mani is an excellent example - probably the best - of ABY's virtuosity at peeling off the layers of human motivation in all their complexity and, very often, perversity. In contrast, this novel depicts a somewhat stereotyped cultural clash between individuals. Anyone familiar with Israeli literature in the past 25 years will also be familiar with the general thrust of the argument. Ashkenazi culture denies the depth and breadth of Sephardi culture. It ignores the cultural heritage of Sephardi Jews, which certainly up to the first millenium and well beyond, held sway over Ashkenazi Jewry. Ashkenazi culture has a tendency to introversion and rejection,whereas Sephardi culture is expansive and interactive, especially with regard to Islam... and so on, and so forth. The hegemonic Ashkenazic view of Sephardi history and culture has been comprehensively deconstructed over the last twenty five years - why go over this ground, especially when in Mr Mani he has already 'deconstructed the deconstruction' by dissecting the history and psychopathology of a high status Sephardi family so comprehensively and brilliantly? As for the dual marriage thing, well I think there's a limit to most people's cultural relativism - especially most women's! It just doesn't work, not as love story and certainly not as erotic writing. Its unlike ABY to fob us off with stereoyped based narrative in order to score ideological points. So... a reasonably good read, but well below top form for the master.
Rating: 
Summary: A Multi-leveled, Multi-cultural Look At History
Review: Many of the other reviewers here must be too young to understand the important topics at hand. There are too many of them to be discussed here, but let me give you one, just for instance.Why are the names of the wives not revealed? As you get deeper into the novel you realize that the two wives are the same wife, the only wife. A man who truly loves a woman loves her for what she truly is, her essence. If you are an older woman, you will know that you are not just who you are now, but also who you were then, a younger woman still existing in the old, despite appearences. And the carnal and the spiritual exist together in the essence. Also, on another level, this is an historic tale of 999, when many Christians predicted the end of the world and an extermination of non-believers, when many held to the letter of the Holy Scripture as a justification of owning slaves and multiple wives. This book takes a sharp look at the conflict between tradition and the evolution of law, and helps us bring current conflicts into focus. Yehoshua is a something of a magician, a master of misdirection who hides the duality of his intent until the reader is ready. Then everything clicks into place. This is a novel you'll want to read again just to see how he does it.
Rating:
Summary: A Multi-leveled, Multi-cultural Look At History
Review: Many of the other reviewers here must be too young to understand the important topics at hand. There are too many of them to be discussed here, but let me give you one, just for instance. Why are the names of the wives not revealed? As you get deeper into the novel you realize that the two wives are the same wife, the only wife. A man who truly loves a woman loves her for what she truly is, her essence. If you are an older woman, you will know that you are not just who you are now, but also who you were then, a younger woman still existing in the old, despite appearences. And the carnal and the spiritual exist together in the essence. Also, on another level, this is an historic tale of 999, when many Christians predicted the end of the world and an extermination of non-believers, when many held to the letter of the Holy Scripture as a justification of owning slaves and multiple wives. This book takes a sharp look at the conflict between tradition and the evolution of law, and helps us bring current conflicts into focus. Yehoshua is a something of a magician, a master of misdirection who hides the duality of his intent until the reader is ready. Then everything clicks into place. This is a novel you'll want to read again just to see how he does it.
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious prose and failed symbolism
Review: My Israeili husband highly recommended this book after reading it in the original Hebrew, and as a medievalist, I could hardly wait to get into the translation. Alas, I was sorely disappointed. There are some wonderful-although not always accurate-descriptions of travel and trade in the tenth century, especially those conjuring up medieval Paris through the embryos of her best known landmarks. Yehoshua also deftly portrays the religious unity but cultural gap between North African and European Jewry, foreshadowing that between Frankiish Christianity and Islam during the Crusades. Nevertheless, the plot loses its drama as a result of the author's unrelenting, serpentine meanderings through the musings of the omniscient narrator. The symbolism of the millenium is also obscure, especially since the protagonists are Jews, whose calendar does not coincide with the Christian millenium. A converted Jewish physician in Verdun, who tends the second wife on the return trip from the Rhineland represents the only significant interaction between the Jewish and Christian worlds during the novel, prophesies a medieval Holocaust when the Christians are disappointed by the non-appearance of the messiah at the millenium. But this theme is not developed and appears to be another example of foreshadowing. As a result I failed to grasp the significance of the book's title, especially if there is supposed to be some symbolic connection between the year 1000 and the year 2000. Finally, I was dismayed that the author names all of his characters except Ben Attar's two wives, always referred to as "the first wife" and "the second wife." Refraining from giving names to two of the principal characters-who just happen to be women- especially when the protagonist is supposed to be arguing for the validity of polygamy and his ability to have a full physical and spiritual union with two wives, is an appalling breach of literary sensitivity. Maybe the book would have been more effective if the editor had shortened it by half, removing the endless repetitions.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and unpredictable
Review: Some members of my book group found the language and complex sentence structure challenging or even slow going at first. But my own reaction was that the writing was both beautiful and (presumably) intended to evoke to some degree the profoundly different pace and feeling of life in the 10th century -- and it seems to do so. There is, I think, a subtle strain of humor that challenges a reader to discover it. Note: it is interesting to consider some of the evocations of events that were to occur in the 20th century, particularly the two great wars, and some similarities between this book and Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts", written on the eve of the second World War. The ambiguity of the ending stimulated much discussion. I found it more bleak than others wanted to acknowledge.
Rating:
Summary: Y1K = Y2K
Review: The positive reviews are right. This is a marvelous book. It weaves a medieval tapestry series from strands of religious law and religious conflict, gender and sexuality, geography and climate, race, culture and ethnicity. Its world -- Paris, Worms and Tangiers in the year 999 C.E. -- is well-researched and vividly imagined. This world feels strange and, at times, truly frightening in its prmitiveness. But it is also very, very familiar. The parallels it draws between Y1K and Y2K are subtle, but they are very much there. This book is dealing with very important issues. It will be with me for a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: Winner of the Koret Award for Best Fiction 1999
Review: This book is the recipient of the Koret Foundation and National Foundation for Jewish Culture Book Award for Best Jewish Fiction Book of 1999
Rating:
Summary: Winner of the Koret Award for Best Fiction 1999
Review: This book is the recipient of the Koret Foundation and National Foundation for Jewish Culture Book Award for Best Jewish Fiction Book of 1999
Rating:
Summary: a wonderful novel of the first millennium
Review: This is a wonderful novel by one of the worlds best novelists. Though he is a past master of dialogue of all sorts, here he abandons it to filter everything through the mind of the storyteller. It has the flavor of a romance and through the quixotic main character makes us see how close comedy and tragedy are and how a tiny change of perspective could make a Captain Ahab into a Don Quixote and vice versa. Though it takes place 1000 years ago in the Middle Ages, it is full of implications about the whole nature of identity and the present relations between East and West, law and desire, sexuality and religion, and so on, but all the ideological concerns are presented gracefully and subtly, so that we remain fascinated, surprised, and delighted by the adventure itself.
Rating:
Summary: A challenging and thought provoking literary feast.
Review: This novel is one of rich prose, beautifully drawn characters and exotic images. In it, the Yehoshua presents a view of 10th century Europe and the interaction of people unexpectedly flung about by the interactions of their cultural points of view. The sensations are strong: exotic scenes of African culture being transported to Europe, sensual couplings, inter- and intra religious conflict, the destruction of close relationships. In the novel, a Morrocan Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, travels with his two wives to Paris intent on salvaging his personal and business relationship with his nephew, Abulafia, now a resident of Paris and recently married to a Jewess from what is now Germany. Because Ben Attar is a bigamist, Abulafia's wife insists that their business and personal relationship be ended. During the sea voyage to Europe, Yehoshua eloquently describes the culture of the Morrocan Jew: flexible, tolerant and richly sensual. However, when the African and European cultures meet face to face, there are profound and sometimes terrible consequences, some of them never to be reversed. Throughout, the the writing is subtle and elegant, and the book has layer upon layer of meaning which the author leaves to the reader to interpret. Although the book has specific Jewish content, the ideas and story are also secular. It was a treat to read and I was left wanting more. Serious and thought-provoking writing.
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