Good Reading
I just finished reading A.B. Yehoshua’s The Lover. As some of you may know, this roman, which was published at the late 1970s, is considered one of the best readings ever published by Yehoshua and in the 1970s Israeli literature; it is also on the literature material at many Israeli highschools. I have some comments on this subject and on the book.
- Reading it now, I realized once again how much schools ruin the compulsory readings. It is just no fun at school, and reading it now I realized that it is actually a very good book for its genre. I agree that schools should have a compulsory reading - as part of the education I’d like everyone to have, but something there doesn’t work: every book that you read there is just less enjoyable.
- Funny social and political developments: the plot deals with the reality of post-1973-war Israel. When referring to the palestinian enemies, the sole term used is ‘Fatah’. Today, they are considered the “peace partners”…
- Apart from this, it is extremely actual. 30 years after its publication, I think it can be safely considered an ‘Israeli Classics’.
- The book is composed of 6 tellers, with interleaved entries: every one tells his part of the story, and the plot moves from one to the other, back and forth. Yet, all the tellers maintain the same style. That is, we get their individual viewpoint but it is clear that the same man wrote all the paragraphs. It was nice to compare this to one of my favorite books, Amos Oz’s Black Box (which was published, I think, a bit later, but around the same time). In Oz’s book there is a similar technique, with each character telling its side of the story, but there you can easily identify each character by a distinct writing style. Yehoshua just uses the same voice for everyone.
- Like in almost all the rest of Yehoshua’s books, he has something with an unusual sex. I guess the guy is just the Heinlein of the Israeli romance genre at his generation.
- An excellent name choice for this book. At the end, I was left wandering who is actually the lover the book was referring to - the term could suit almost all the characters, and certainly not only the “obvious” one.
- Also, an outstanding opening line: “and we, in the last war, we lost a lover…” narrated by a character with the so symbolic name Adam; and note that he uses plural term.
- Which leads you to wander about the choice of names for the characters. Adam’s wife is called Asia; two arab characters are called Na’im (”pleasent” in Hebrew) and Hammid (a name derived from Muhammad, but with a tone that resembles “cute” in Hebrew).
To conclude - another excellent reading. I strongly recommend reading it, a few years after you finish highschool.
October 11th, 2006 at 0:04
Hi Elad
I read it at high-school as compulsory reading, and I loved it. It was a good fit for my mood at the time.
The secret is to forget that it’s compulsory and just read it like you would any other book, for fun.
– Arik
October 11th, 2006 at 4:25
רומן in english is “Novel”, and has nothing to do with the specific story genre called “romance” - although “The Lover” might be classified under such genre, though I would disagree, even if I never managed to read it through to the end.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:36
I read it in high school too. I do not like the author but I got till the end.
The only book which I failed to read by the end belonged to Balzak.
October 17th, 2006 at 23:41
Oh, I’ve managed to find more then a couple of really bad books. As I grew up with the belief that once you start a book you have to read it through to the end (baring end of the school year and the novel being a really long and boring one), I had the misfortune of reading through to the end of some really crappy stories. Eventually I learned to let it go and now I happily drop bad books without completing them