I'm 1/3 of the way through this, and I'm really enjoying it -- if it's possible to enjoy a book about a woman whose son is serving in the Israeli military during a wartime operation and about a man who was tortured while serving in the Israeli military at age 17. But it reads a bit like Jonathan Franzen -- nothing po-mo. Just straightforward good storytelling and certainly an interesting plot with interesting moral dilemmas. For example, early in the book, the main character asks her Arab driver -- who has driven her family everywhere for 20 years -- to drop her soldier son off at the meeting point, where all of the soldiers are meeting up to serve in the military operation. Only as they are driving there does she realize what a terrible position she has put the driver in.

Of course with me there is also the whole Jewish/Israeli "thing." Culturally it's all very interesting to me (not to mention vaguely familiar), and I have my Hebrew dictionary by my bedside so that I can look up untranslated Hebrew words that I don't know.

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Update: Sigh. I'm putting this down 40% of the way through it. I am disappointed in myself for not liking this book, but the promise it showed initially dissipated for me once Grossman got into the heart of the book: the long walk that the main character, Ora, takes with Avram, the shell-shocked father of the son who is involved with the military operation. I like taut writing, an economy of words, and this section of the book was anything but that. Much of it is Ora recalling details of her son's life that would be tedious to anyone but his own parents. And the cultural exploration that I found interesting early on was much less apparent during this section of the book.