Amos Oz – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.24 SUDDENLY IN THE DEPTHS OF THE FOREST by Amos Oz /2011/suddenly-in-the-depths-of-the-forest-by-amos-oz/ Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:32:49 +0000 /?p=16881 Book Quote:

“Just then a cow came toward them, a slow cow, an extremely proud and well-connected cow, a very distinguished cow adorned with black and white spots. She trudged and swayed her way slowly, filled with self-importance, past the sleepy tigers, nodding her head two or three times as if she was totally and completely and entirely not surprised, absolutely not surprised, on the contrary, all her calculations had been correct and all her early assumptions had proved to be accurate, and now she nodded also because she was pleased she was right and also because she definitely agreed with herself fully and utterly and always, and without the slightest shadow of a doubt.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (MAR 21, 2011)

Any writer who can so completely capture the essence of cowness, even in translation (here by Sondra Silverston) is most certainly worth reading, and I am entirely pleased to make the acquaintance of Israeli novelist Amos Oz. Never mind that this airy little story of 2005, which the author describes as “A fable for all ages,” is almost certainly merely a footnote to Oz’s work, barely reflecting what I understand to be the seriousness of his major work, let alone the outspoken commitment of his political writings. It is still a story worth reading once for its charm and twice for its meaning.

The appearance of this gloriously self-satisfied cow is significant because the story opens in a village entirely without animals. A few older inhabitants, such as Emanuella the teacher or Almon the Fisherman, still remember what dogs, cats, and goats looked and sounded like, but people treat their memories with unconvinced indulgence. Almon, of course, is no longer a fisherman because there are no longer fish to catch; he spends his days talking to his scarecrow, even though there are no birds to scare away. No woodworm, either, to send him to sleep with the sound of their gentle chomping on his furniture. One night, all the animals suddenly disappeared, taken up presumably into the dark forest-clad mountains surrounding the village. The inhabitants lock their doors securely at night, for Old Nehi the Demon is liable to come prowling and snatch children away, as he has already taken the animals.

One child does disappear into the forest: Little Nimi with the gap between his buck teeth and the snot hanging out of his nose, who was never really part of the other groups of children, though eagerly tagging along behind. Little Nimi, who disappears one day only to come back three weeks later, whooping like an owl but insanely happy to be going his own way. Which was all very well, since of course he could not go back to school with his whoopitis, or even to his home. Two other children, Matti and Maya, also stay a little apart from the others, because they share a secret: that once, in the depths of a very narrow pool in the river, they saw a small, silvery, but very live fish. One day, Matti and the even bolder Maya decide to go up into the forest to see for themselves; the second half of the book tells of what they found there.

A fable for all ages? Perhaps. I could certainly imagine reading it to children, although they might get bored with the first part of the book, which moves slowly, telling much the same thing over in only slightly different ways. But it certainly builds an atmosphere, a brooding sense of fear, sterility, and repression. By contrast, the book moves almost too quickly at the end, as its targets multiply well beyond the simple moral of acceptance. More than once I was reminded of Browning’s Pied Piper. Children whose interest ends with the rambunctious rounding-up of the rats would be too young for the Oz. But those who can be moved by the pathos of the final scene where the children disappear, all except for the one who was too lame to keep up, would find a lot in this little book.

The best fables always do work for adults too. While nothing is every crassly hammered home, there are resonances of many kinds. Is it, for example, a fable for our century, with climate change and the loss of biodiversity? Is it about people haunted by their past but unable to embrace it? Is it a political parable for a nation living in fear of its neighbors? I feel it is almost insulting to put these things in such stark terms, for Oz is far from simplistic. But the resonances are there, and I look forward to reading some of his other books where he addresses them more directly.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 27 readers
PUBLISHER: Harcourt Children’s Books; 1 edition (March 21, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Amos Oz
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> RHYMING LIFE AND DEATH by Amos Oz /2009/rhyming-life-and-death-by-amos-oz/ Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:19:19 +0000 /?p=369 Book Quote:

“Why do you write?  Why do you write the way you do?  Are you trying to influence your readers, and, if so, how?  What role do your books play?  Do you constantly cross out and correct or do you write straight out of your head?  What is it like to be a famous writer and what effect does it have on your family?…And by the way, how would you define yourself?”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (APR 19, 2009)

When the Author, the otherwise unnamed main character of Amos Oz’s newest work, arrives at a literary evening at the Shunia Shor Community Center in Tel Aviv as the special guest, he expects the usual sorts of questions from his audience.  What his audience never suspects is that the author, while answering their sometimes intrusive questions about himself, is secretly inventing names and imaginary lives for them, connecting them to each other, and even continuing his musings about them well into the night after the meeting is concluded.  Approximately thirty-five characters, either in the audience or peripheral to the stories the Author is creating, dominate the Author’s interior life, even as the real humans behind these stories are talking with him about his work.  When the audience leaves the community center, they are unaware of their continuing lives in the Author’s imagination.

Among these characters is Tsefania Beit-Halachmi (also known as Avraham “Bumek” Schuldenfrei), an elderly poet who is the author of a collection of poems called Rhyming Life and Death.”  The poems themselves echo throughout the book—mostly doggerel—as both the narrator/Author and the book’s author, Amos Oz, explore serious questions of life and death, and eventually some less serious questions of sex and death.

Following the meeting at the community center, the Author escorts the unattractive and painfully shy Rochele Reznik, home after the meeting, hoping for an evening of passion.   His failure leads him to explore of the ideas of another invented character, Arnold Bartok, a part-time philosopher who has noted that “It is not life and death that came into the world as a pair, but sex and death.”  Death, Bartok believes, “appeared aeons later than life,” when sexual reproduction was created, and it is sex that has led to aging and death.  “We simply have to find a way of eliminating sex,” he says, “so as to rid our world of the inevitability of death, and of so much suffering as well.

Taking a modernist approach to writing, Oz plays with the form of the book, creating a wide cast of characters who exemplify the themes which he (and, of course the Author) wishes to explore, issues both serious and tongue in cheek.  The attractive waitress at the café where the Author has coffee becomes “Ricky,” whose football-playing boyfriend “Charlie” has also enjoyed the favors of “Lucy,” runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, who married the son of Ovadya Hazzam, who won a lottery and is now dying of cancer in a miserable hospital room.  Miriam Nehorait, a middle-aged culture lover at the meeting, may have had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old, unhappy and hypersensitive young poet in the audience, who is anxious to have the Author read his poems, and they may have been observed by yet another woman, a neighborhood snoop.  Arnold Bartok’s mother, age 86, and paralyzed from the waist down sleeps beside him at night, while Yerucham Shdemati is dying of a blood disease.  The lecturer Bar-Orian, widowed twice and living alone, has been abandoned by his only daughter.  Life is difficult and usually painful; death is inevitable—and also painful.

Life and death and love and sex echo throughout the novella, as the Author wends his way through the city after his literary evening, thinking about his characters and not always willing or able to differentiate between his imaginative life and his real life.  Twice divorced, he himself is returning to an empty apartment at four a.m.  When he arrives, the alarm system of a car is screaming because it “can no longer bear its loneliness.”  The man on the other side of the Author’s apartment wall is weeping, and a nightbird is shrieking.   When the Author opens the local newspaper before going to bed, he discovers that Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, the author of Rhyming Life and Death, has just died.  “Once in a while it is worth turning on the light to clarify what is going on,” he declares simply.

Though the “novel” blurs the boundaries of reality and imagination and leaves a number of loose ends and undeveloped ideas, Oz provides an unusual and creative meditation on his themes and on the transience of happiness, life, love, and fame.  Often darkly humorous and ironic, the author offers few glimmers of hope for the future, however.  Life is what it is, and though we can escape from reality through dreams and our imaginations, Oz lets us know that sooner or later we must all “turn on the light to clarify what is going on.”  It is not much to look forward to.  “Tomorrow,” he tells us, “will be warm and humid, too.  And, in fact, tomorrow is today.”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 10 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (April 14, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Amos Oz
EXTRAS: Paris Review interview with Amos Oz
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]]> MY MICHAEL by Amos Oz /2009/my-michael-by-amos-oz/ Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:18:52 +0000 /?p=375 Book Quote:

“My husband and I are like two strangers who happen to meet coming out of a clinic where they have received treatment involving some physical unpleasantness.  Both embarrassed, reading each other’s minds, conscious of an uneasy, embarrassing intimacy, wearily groping for the right tone in which to address each other.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (APR 19, 2009)

Hannah Gonen is only thirty when she makes this observation about her husband Michael.  A young woman living in Jerusalem in the late 1950s, she has been married for ten years to a man she pursued and married when she was in her first year at the university and he was a graduate student.  Michael, who describes himself to Hannah as “good…a bit lethargic, but hard-working, responsible, clean, and very honest,” eventually earns his PhD. degree in geology and begins work at the university, but Hannah, who has given up her literature studies upon her marriage, soon finds married life—and Michael himself—to be tedious.  Her only child resembles Michael in personality, a child rooted in reality, who “finds objects much more interesting than people or words.”

Writing in short, factual sentences, which come alive through his choice of details, author Amos Oz, often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, recreates Hannah’s story of her marriage, a marriage which may or may not survive.  Hannah and Michael married in 1949, shortly after Israel gained its independence, and the author often uses Hannah’s battles for independence and control of her life to reflect the growing pains of a new land, determined to defend itself and protect its integrity.   As their family backgrounds unfold, the personalities of Hannah and Michael and their behavior within the marriage are seen in a wider context.  Hannah, who yearns for excitement, draws on her rich store of childhood memories and often escapes into a dream world.  Michael, hard-working and pragmatic, remains a geologist, firmly connected to the earth.

After their child is born, a year after the marriage, it is Michael who usually takes care of him and washes his diapers.  Hannah, mired in depression, says she is “contracted, withdrawn into myself as though I had lost a tiny jewel on the sea bed.”  Gradually, she becomes more and more unstable, more and more depressed and hysterical, until she makes herself ill, a condition which she sees, ironically, as offering her some freedom.  “I had lost my powers of alchemy, the ability to make my dreams carry me over the dividing line between sleeping and waking,” she explains.  Despite Hannah’s self-pity and hysteria, Michael, the logical, reliable, unexciting husband retains his composure, so much so that Hannah wonders, “When will this man lose his self-control?  Oh, to see him just once in a panic.  Shouting for joy.  Running wild.”

As the marriage and Hannah’s sanity deteriorate, the author’s use of symbols gives depth and universality to the story.  Hannah often imagines a glass dome over herself and her family, and wishes only that it remain transparent, not cloudy.  She remembers the childhood games she played with Arab twins in her neighborhood, bossing them around, and she now fears they will wreak their vengeance on her.  She imagines warships, a search for Moby Dick on the Nautilus, and a forcible rape.  Her relationship with an innocent Orthodox teenager turns into a power struggle, and she creates a new personality, that of Yvonne Azulai, a young woman who leads an exciting life.  Even the changing seasons parallel Hannah’s state of mind, with much of her story taking place in the autumn.

Rich with imagery and dense with symbols, this novel, first published in 1968 and recently republished in paperback, depicts two characters who deal in different ways with crises in their lives and marriage.  Though the novel is set in Jerusalem about fifty years ago, the issues with which these characters are dealing are as pertinent today as they were then, and the emotional implications are as affecting .  Psychologically true, the novel achieves rare universality, even though the reader may not empathize completely with Hannah, who is so often self-indulgent, or Michael, who, though reliable and honest, has so little imagination.  Beautifully realized, My Michael, which shows Hannah’s possessiveness and need for control even in the title, depicts an immature woman who does not know who she herself is when she joins her life to that of someone else.  In this case, two hearts continue to beat as two.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 15 reviewers
PUBLISHER: Harvest Books (November 2005)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Amos Oz
EXTRAS: Guardian interview with Amos Oz
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of

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