“In the opinion of one grateful reader, he has written a masterpiece.”
“Yehoshua’s poetic images conjure up bursts of dense Oscar Kokoshka color, the savage comedy of George Grosz’s caricatures, the playful humor of Paul Klee and even the stately gravity of the black-and-white illustrations of biblical legends. And all this is held together by the author’s murmuring irony and wisdom, which makes us hope that maybe, sometime, Molkho will fall in love after all.”
“… a meditation on the cycles of change and renewal, and a portrait of a middle-aged man, glimpsed at a transition point in his life.”
“…a fiction that matters.”
“Mr Mani is conceived on an epic scale as a hymn to the continuity of Jewish life. This formulation sounds pat and sentimental, but Yehoshua’s achievement is the opposite: it always suggests even more complex worlds beyond the vignettes of which the novel is composed.”
“Suffused with sensuous receptiveness to Jerusalem — its coppery light, its pungent smells, its babble of tongues, its vistas crumbling with history — Yehoshua’s minutely researched novel ramifies out from the city to record the rich and wretched elements that have gone into the founding and continuation of the nation whose centre it has once again become.”
“Adjectives come racing to mind to describe Mr Mani, for instance ‘rich, complex, exotic, creative, informative’, but ‘easy’ is one that does not fit. On finishing it, this reader had the reaction that he had to turn back to the beginning in order to grasp more firmly the sources of his admiration…It is extraordinarily skilful to have captured the Jewish mixture of suffering and revival, despair and messianic hope, without in any way spelling out such heavy themes.”
“A.B. Yehoshua has created a historical and psychological universe — nearly biblical in the range and penetration of its enchanting ‘begats’ — with an amazingly real Jerusalem at its centre. It is as if the blood-pulse of this ingeniously inventive novel had somehow fused with the hurtling vision of the generations of Genesis. With Mr. Mani, Yehoshua once again confirms his sovereign artistry; and Hillel Halkin’s translation has a brilliant and spooky life of its own.”
“The one-sided dialogues not only give this complex novel a much needed simplicity of form but they also engage us. We begin to fill in the missing words until each of us becomes the silent partner. For this is more than just a tale of one eccentric family; it has the relentlessness of the Old Testament, the contentiousness of Job. The Manis not only pass down their sense of guilt, the source of their quixotic and often tragic fate, they ask in each generation what it means to be a Jew: are we not all from the same seed, are we not all ‘Jews forgetful of being Jews’?”
“In Yehoshua’s rich, grave fictions, private and public lives cannot be separated; the tale of a flawed individual or disintegrating relationship is simultaneously an emblem for a country in crisis. Literature is history, an event a symbol, writing a way of exploring the world. Yehoshua is a marvellous story teller but also a profoundly political writer, always arguing for uncertain humanism rather than zealous nationalism in a country where everyone lives on the front line.”
“…Yehoshua has here produced his own version of an epic chronicle, a homecoming in which the present is fulfilled in the past, the seed implicit in the future growth. The novel has something of the quality of a modern prophecy, of the still small voice in the wilderness.”
“Mr. Mani is one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction I have ever read, and convinces me more than ever of Yehoshua’s very great gift”.
“Mr. Mani, lucidly translated by Hillel Halkin, is Mr. Yehoshua’s most ambitious, wide-ranging novel. It is a literary tour de force that broadens the author’s vision and the novel’s boundaries beyond Israel.”
“To read A.B. Yehoshua is to submit oneself to the turmoils of the human heart. His are the type of books…I hesitate to start, because I find it impossible to put them down.”
“The novel flows powerfully in fluent, confident yet simple prose: it has a compelling story line and vividly drawn characters, and it is infused with a big and serious theme, the nature of love and the mysteries of the human soul.”
“At times literary and mannered, at times incantatory and magical, sometimes disturbing and often astonishing, Open Heart never fails to entertain the mind while it captivates the soul.”
“Wherever this innovative, erudite, suggestive, mysterious writer — a true master of contemporary fiction — points us, there can be no doubt, it is essential that we go.”
“Yehoshua is so graceful and eloquent that his work’s timeliness also succeeds, paradoxically, in making it timeless.”
“This is a generous, sensuous narrative, in which women adroitly manoeuvre within their inherited role, and theories of irrevocable Arab-Jewish hatred are obliquely refuted.”
“One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.”
“Above all, Yehoshua is a master storyteller, who coaxes his readers far into an alien landscape, allowing him to question familiar orthodoxies — that moral codes are universal, that jealousy governs every personal relationship, and that religious boundaries are set in stone.”
“The Liberated Bride seethes with emotions, dreams, ideas, humor, pathos, all against a backdrop of violence, conflict, and terror.”