The Lover
by
A.B. Yehoshua
For my children Sivan, Gideon and Nahum
Praise
“It seems typical of this highly talented Israeli writer that we are left with more questions than answers after reading what he has to tell us and that the most urgent and disturbing questions are always more suggested by his work than stated in it.”
“Yehoshua … is very much the enfant terrible whose stories evoke the dreadful silence of a people who live on the edge of destruction. Paradoxically, Yehoshua — like his literary Doppelgänger Amos Oz — is today a Grand Old Man of Israeli letters.”
“The originality of these stories, their characters, and the emotions they express so precisely and movingly have remained so clearly in my mind that I feel justified in taking risks. I was as moved and impressed by them as when I read Mann’s Death in Venice and some of Chekhov.”
“Yehoshua makes great art out of seemingly unpromising characters and situations.”
“…for Yehoshua has found a way of writing inside that no-man’s land where the perception of objective reality and private dream or hallucination jostle for position. Reading his stories you realise that this shifting between real and unreal is not peculiar to his characters. It is actually what goes on in our heads most of the time. I don’t know any writer who has transcribed this phenomenon so economically.”
“Yehoshua himself emerges through the collection as a writer of borderline states: he describes near-madness, near-death, near-sadism. People living under continual threat of war toy with their fantasies until they bring them to life. They succumb to a detachment that verges on cruelty or to a love that verges on masochism. They regard their lives with restrained despair, while secretly longing for tragedy and resolution. Yehoshua explores all this with understated formality and a difficult and moving honesty.”
“…a considerable œuvre.”
“Even at his most prosaic, Yehoshua’s vision remains dark and menacing but this can be conveyed to powerful and haunting effect, as in “The Last Commander”, an offering to rank with the greatest of war stories. A welcome and far from silent collection.”
“It is a disturbing, brilliantly assured novel, and almost thirty years after its first appearance it retains a startling originality.”
“In place of the unifying and optimistic passions of Zionism, [A. B. Yehoshua’s] skilful, delicate prose depicts a darker country of insomnia, claustrophobia and disconnectedness, while the clever contrast of perspectives emphasises the vast gulf that can exist between people who supposedly love one another.”
“In this profound study of personal and political trauma, Yehoshua … evokes Israel’s hallucinatory reality.”
“There is no scarcity of books about the Yom Kippur War but few have attempted to chart the inner human landscape as painstakingly as The Lover.”
“…a more vivid sense of the country than most documentaries would provide.”
“It is greatly to the credit of A.B. Yehoshua, that his major novel, The Lover, manages to convey in both breadth and depth the traumas of the Yom Kippur War without in any sense being a war novel.”
“Like Amos Oz, Yehoshua is proposing that the true realities of Israeli life are nighttime ones — dreams, nightmares, wishes and hopes — while the piercing light of day reveals only the mundane surface.”
“…a work of genuine distinction.”
“The Lover is a truly modern novel, filled with irony, ambiguity, inconclusiveness and images of the wasteland. It is an acute criticism of Israel, the Diaspora and contemporary values — it deserves our attention.”
“… thank goodness for a novel that is ambitious and humane and that is about things that really matter.”
“Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under licence of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce.”
“Molkho’s adventures are quietly hilarious in the way Kafka is hilarious.”
“The novel succeeds in charting the ways in which grief and passions cannot be cheated…”
“A wonderfully engaging, exquisitely controlled, luminous work.”
“In this finely observed and oddly moving comic novel…Yehoshua makes us feel [Molkho’s] humanity — and deftly wins him our sympathy.”
“…a gentle comedy of manners about a widower in want of a wife.”
“…[a] sad, emotionally convincing comedy.”
“This novel is all that a novel ought to be: comic, sad, human, and above all, with the ring of truth.”
“…Yehoshua fashions a totally absorbing work of art. So subtle is his skill that even scenes of brilliantly realized comedy are executed with such dry understatement that they catch the reader totally unaware.”