השקרים האחרונים של הגוף

by Gail Hareven, גיל הראבן

אלינור ברנדיס חיה באושר. יש לה בעל עורך דין, שני בנים בוגרים מוצלחים וטור פופולארי בעיתון, והיא ישנה מצוין בלילה. צלצול טלפון ביום שבת מפיל את כל הקירות הבטוחים, ומחזיר אותה בבת אחת אל מה שהתרחש בחדר מספר 22, בפנסיון המשפחתי הקטן שניהלו הוריה בירושלים.

בחדר מספר 22 שבקצה המסדרון התארח הדוד מאמריקה, היסטוריון נודע וגם קרוב משפחה שביקש חדר שקט ומבודד כדי לעבוד על מחקר חדש על היטלר.

אלינור ואחותה אלישבע, שהיו אז נערות, לא הפריעו לו. רק הרבה אחרי שהוא נסע התברר שהמחקר שלו היה רחב בהרבה ממה שניתן לשער. אלישבע ניסתה לספר מה קרה בחדר ההוא, אבל אף אחד לא רצה להאמין.

יותר מ-30 שנה אחרי, הדוד מתקשר. הוא מגיע להרצות בירושלים, ואלינור נסחפת למערבולת של זיכרונות וסיוטים, ונאלצת להתמודד עם פחדים, עם שקרים שחשבה שלמדה לחיות איתם, עם אשמה שלא מרפה. היא לא מצליחה לעבוד, נוסעת לאמריקה וחוזרת, מתנתקת מחבריה, מתרחקת מבעלה. לבסוף היא מגיעה למסקנה שכדי להחזיר לעצמה את השליטה בחייה, דרוש מעשה קיצוני. קיצוני מאוד.

ספרה הראשון של גיל הראבן (1959) ראה לאור ב-1986. היה זה ספר הילדים "אגדה חדשה", שקדם לו מחזמר שהועלה על הבמה וזכה להצלחה, ואף בפרס הרי הרשון. ב-1992 התפרסם "תקווה אם נתעקש", ספר תיעודי על העלייה החדשה מרוסיה, ושנה אחר כך יצא לאור ספר הפרוזה הראשון שלה למבוגרים - קובץ הסיפורים "ארוחת צהריים עם אמא". כעבור שנה ראה אור הרומן הראשון שלה, "הסיפור האמיתי".

בשנת 2002 זכה הרומן פרי עטה "שאהבה נפשי" בפרס ספיר, ותורגם לאנגלית. סיפורים קצרים שלה התפרסמו באנתולוגיות ובכתבי עת באנגלית, ברוסית, בצ'כית ובאיטלקית. "השקרים האחרונים של הגוף" הוא ספרה השלושה-עשר.

Genres: Fiction, Israel, Jewish, Novels, Middle East, Cultural

Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Gail Haraven (Hebrew: גיל הראבן) is a writer from Israel. She is the author of six novels and three short story collections, as well as plays and nonfiction. She was awarded the prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature for The Confessions of Noa Weber, and currently lives in Jerusalem. The Confessions of Noa Weber is her first book translated into English.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

A provocative novel from the Hebrew exploring the impact of a sister’s childhood rape on a newspaper columnist and her husband. The rapist, known as the ‘Not-Man’ is protagonist Elinor’s uncle, and after time in exile in America, is due to appear in Jerusalem repenting a first-person autobiography of Hitler, and perhaps his earlier crimes. The novel is readable with its straightforward prose and thought-provoking themes (not unlike those middlebrow ‘dilemma’ novels in this language), although its focus on the protagonist’s detailed feelings and opinions on her uncle, her sister, her husband, her column’s heroine (a “pigtail-sucker”, we are told 1000+ times), and all other aspects of her life means the reader has to beg the narrator’s indulgence often (and question when she is fibbing or not, or if it matters), and proceed in spite of her repetitions, and the standoffish and humourless tone. Otherwise, an adequate read.

[Jason Pettus]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

In a universe where I'm now reading and reviewing several hundred novels every single year, it's always a portentous occasion when one of them slows me down to a crawl merely because I don't want to miss anything that's being said; and that's what's made me realize what a special thing I've had on my hands for the last month with Gail Hareven's Lies, First Person, originally published in her native Hebrew in 2008 but with an English version only coming out late last year, thanks to the tireless Open Letter Books which exists only to publish such complicated literature in translation.

At its heart, it's a domestic thriller with a killer hook: the feisty middle-aged heroine, who grew up Jewish in Israel, once had an uncle who was a respected academe, until he published an instantly controversial biography of Hitler in which he tried to "humanize" the dictator by writing it first-person, and who as part of his "journey to understanding evil" ended up raping and intellectually torturing the heroine's mentally challenged sister while she was a pre-teen, a fact that never came out publicly but that tore her family apart in differing ways for each person. Now it's thirty years later and this long-lost monster is back out on a high-profile "apology tour," renouncing the book that once made his career, and has asked our narrator if she'd be willing to meet with him when he's scheduled to lecture in Jerusalem in a few months. (That's about the minimum you need to know in order to understand the book's main thrust, although be aware that the story goes off in several other interesting directions besides just this.)

This would be fascinating enough, but then Hareven writes the actual novel in what I like to call a "Judaic style of literature," based on how I saw CCLaP author Kevin Haworth write his essay collection for us a few years ago, Famous Drownings in Literary History; not quite a straight narrative, not quite memoir, partly self-aware and partly getting lost in the story, with humor and drama flip-flopping on a page-by-page basis. That's what makes the book such a linguistic delight, apart from the very sober but fascinating plot being unwound (and it's a very rewarding plot, make no mistake, one that would make for a fine adaptation into an indie film); it's not told in a straightforward style at all, but rather a wry, metafictional, self-knowing one, a style that relies on symbolism and metaphor, fable-telling and postmodernist revisionist fable-telling, and no wonder that it took a really special publisher like Open Letter to get the subtle translation from Hebrew right. (For those who don't know, Open Letter is much like the Criterion Collection from the film world -- dedicated nerdy professionals who are obsessively devoted to technical quality within the arts, in this case with doing artistically faithful translations of books that are notoriously difficult to translate.)

A book with something for everyone, it will be a real treat for those who like their literature dense, European-flavored, and culturally significant; but it's a hell of a beach-style page-turner too, and you're never quite sure what the exciting ending of this story is going to be until you actually get to it. It comes strongly recommended today for one and all, and will undoubtedly be making our best-of lists at the end of the year.

Out of 10: 9.7

[Robert Wechsler]

A singular novel that shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. The narrator is annoying, the plot is melodramatic, and the novel is overlong. And yet it’s fascinating, a great feat of form over content. There are themes galore (see the other reviews here), but it is the way Hareven has her narrator string them out and together that keeps them from getting all twisted up. I didn’t find myself thinking or feeling as much as being caught up in the narrator’s singular mind. And admiring the author’s and the translator’s skills. A 4.5.

[Daniel Polansky]

A middle-aged Israeli woman becomes obsessed with taking vengeance on her uncle, who molested her sister years earlier as part of an effort to plumb the mind of Adolf Hitler. It's...extremely dark. Ms. Hareven is clearly very talented – the prose itself is uncomplicated, but the moral questions she raises – about guilt, and evil, and the possibility of redemption, are of the highest order. Raised, but never answered. The ending – THIS IS SORT OF SPOILERY, SORRY – seems to so nakedly praise the healing power of vengeance as to suggest that either our unreliable narrator is being unreliable, or the writer is making a broader ironic commentary. And while both of those notions seem possible I confess I struggled to discern strong evidence for either, or at least not significantly stronger than for a blunter reading of the text. Page to page it also drags about, particular during the long third portion during which the (anti-)heroine is talking herself into violence which I found rather tiring. That said, sometimes you can not like a book but still like the writer, if that makes sense, and I'll keep an eye out for something else by Ms. Hareven.

[Jean Kelly]

If read just for the story, fascinating and hard to put down. On another level it raises so many difficult questions - if the victim forgives, what about others touched by the crime who won't? When does the poison of an abuse stop poisoning the family, friends and everyone it touches? When is revenge ok? Does it settle the issue?
I was not familiar with the author before but wish all her books were in translation.

[Linda]

Intriguing premise that works for most of the book. Never quite knowing if the speaker is telling the truth is nicely unsettling. However, the unconventional conclusion just lacks credibility. I still would have given it 4 stars but the book badly needed an editor. It is filled with misspellings, extra words, and poor punctuation. The translation is not good, either.

[Lily]

This book was fine until about halfway through, when I felt like things were finished emotionally but then I had to keep reading to discover why there were literally 120 pages until the end. The end was, on paper, satisfying, but in a way I hated because the rest of the book had been so realistic, or at least I felt that everyone's reaction to things could have happened the way they did, if that makes sense. Also, just a warning, this book has really graphic descriptions of pedophilia and sexual assault, which I feel like, to the author and probably to the readers, creates this like, perverted fascination with what exactly happened to her but like?? It's none of our business! Even though she's not a real person, I don't like that this book seems to care more about the nature of the sexual assault then a survivor, and I think the book's tendency to do that makes it seem contradictory to what the protagonist is fighting against.

[Fen]

An awful attempt at a "literary thriller." It's melodramatic. It's cheesy. It's twice as long as it should be. The symbolism is so subtle it could have been written by a ten-year-old learning about symbolism for the first time. (The protagonists are in the Garden of Eden. The bad guy is a snake.) Literary references include the ham-handedly obvious: the Marquis de Sade. Lolita. The narrative voice is annoying, the action contrived and nonsensical. Cliche after cliche. It's repetitive. It attempts to use literary devices but uses them inconsistently and ineffectively. It tries to be "meta" and lampshade its flaws by having the characters point them out. "This is just like in a cop show teehee!"

It is about the sexual abuse of a child. And Hitler. It is unironically about these things. It does not approach the topics with any tact.

Generic thriller blurb: Elinor and her handsome and perfect husband Oded have the perfect life. Their two handsome and perfect sons are grown and attending college in America, and the parents still love each other and have lots of hot sex. Oded's parents love Elinor despite her being "alternative" (AKA, having short hair and a tattoo). But this perfect family has a dark secret. One day Elinor and Oded get an unwanted phone call from Elinor's "Uncle Aaron," an evil rapist who raped her sister into insanity and wrote a book sympathizing with Hitler despite being a Holocaust survivor. What will happen next? Will their marriage survive? /blurb

The novel has several natural conclusions, but instead of ending it, Haraven drags it on... and on... There is a lengthy sequence with Elinor's sister, Elisheva, who has found Jesus and moved to rural Illinois with her missionary husband. At this point, Elinor and Elisheva finally have their first adult discussion about how Elisheva has coped with surviving abuse (though it's not a discussion, just an infodumping monologue), and it feels like the novel's climax. But in turn Elinor basically goes insane instead, and she and her husband stop having lots of hot sex (boo!), and the novel continues to drag on as she contemplates murdering Aaron, who is coming to Israel, among other things.

There are some interesting ideas covered amongst all this melodrama, particularly a critique of Christianity. Elisheva has forgiven Aaron, per Christian doctrine, something that offers Elinor no comforts. To the contrary, she feels like the burden of his actions have been taken off Elisheva's shoulders and deposited onto hers instead. But because this critique is buried under melodrama and poor writing it does not go anywhere.

Elinor is meant to be an unreliable narrator, and this manifests a few times, when Haraven writes a chapter and then rewrites it in modified form. But this device is rarely used and I fail to see the point of it. By all accounts, Elinor is a reliable narrator most of the time. All it does is add length.

There is also a running motif about Alice, Elinor's fictional creation for a newspaper column, a pigtail-pulling tourist from Alaska who travels around Israel and gets into hijinks. Apart from serving as a reflection of Elinor's mood, I failed to see the point of Alice. She is just annoying and her pigtail-pulling (mentioned every damn time) gets old fast. She also disappears for long stretches as if Haraven forgot about her. Weirdly, Elisheva also mostly disappears after serving her purpose in the Illinois scenes. It seems kind of in poor taste--a story about sexual abuse of a child that mostly excludes the victim.

When the evil Aaron finally makes an appearance, he engages in villainous monologuing: he is a "dispassionate intellectual," who sees everything as a symbol, and is out-of-touch with reality. If you've seen an episode of a cop show, you know this style of melodramatic climactic scene. If it's not clear from his pages of monologuing that Aaron is basically a hyper-intellectual psychopath, Elinor and Oded explain it to the reader. The "literary" stuff out of the way, Haraven returns to the thriller plot, and all sorts of contrivances and coincidences play out. The ending will probably please thriller plans who like contrived endings with no loose ends. It will probably make literary fiction fans roll their eyes, if they haven't tired of rolling them already.

[Elise]

Lies, First Person is so many things--a psychological thriller that you will want to stay up late to read and a beautifully written story with resonance in both a philosophical and literary sense. I don't want to say too much for fear of giving away important twists and turns. Just read it. I highly recommend this one.

[Sue]

Start out rather slow, & in fact, my main complaint about the book is its slowness through most of the book. But it is a brilliant & even disturbing exploration of issues of evil and of forgiveness. This story will stick with me for a long while.

[Sarah]

This was a very strange read for me. It was one of the most frustrating books I've ever read in my life — when I was reading it, I just wanted to be done.

It's a translation, and some of the issues can be attributed to that, to the language: Amos Oz says reading his work in translation is like making love through a blanket, and I can see that here, see how it could have been beautiful in Hebrew.

But it was verbose and overwritten. It was too long — it could have been half the length and still told the same story. The narrator was overdramatic to a fault.

But — this is why it gets three stars from me. Usually I'll just put down a book I'm not enjoying. This one, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to keep reading. So make of that what you will.

[Alexandra Hanna]

I’ve never felt so inside a character’s head before. Dark and thought provoking.

[David]

My review begins in New York Journal of Books and continues in an article that appeared in a different and now defunct publication, which begins with the next paragraph.

Israeli books: Gail Hareven's Lies, First Person is a visceral novel of ideas

Lies, First Person, Gail Hareven’s second novel to be translated into English (the eleventh of her thirteen adult books published in Hebrew), which is published today by Open Letter Books, is both an emotionally compelling narrative and a novel of ideas. Its characters find different ways of coping with the emotional aftermath of an unreported and unpunished crime, and the novel invites its readers to consider such questions as the nature of evil and the justification of vengeance and retribution.

In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I praise it as a “beautifully written and powerful” … “multifaceted book that rewards rereading.” But I also have several reservations not least of which is the first person narrator’s endorsement of vigilante retribution. I unpack these issues in my NYJB review which also includes a plot synopsis. In an interview in the Jerusalem Report Hareven says “that vigilantes do not generally add justice to the world.”

But in the same interview Hareven finds “The use of the first person creates identification with the narrator.” For her narrator Elinor, “evil is a tangible being incarnated in Gothilf” (Elinor’s sister’s rapist). Hareven continues, “I don’t share all of the viewpoints of my characters, but I completely share this feeling of Elinor’s.” Hareven goes on to endorse a view of evil she attributes to American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor as “an ancient drive,” and that people commit evil deeds because they are indeed evil.

In my NYJB review I cite American writer Ron Rosenbaum’s diametrically opposite view expressed in an interview in The Daily Beast, “I’ve come to think that evil adheres in ideas more than in people. People are seduced by evil ideas.” Readers of Lies, First Person can decide for themselves whether to side with Elinor and Hareven or with Rosenbaum on the nature of evil.

In the Jerusalem Report interview Hareven also said that after writing Lies, First Person she began to question prisoner exchanges in which terrorists are freed: “I tried to understand in a serious way what this does to the victims and their families.” But Elinor and Hareven’s apparent endorsement of retribution has wider implications for their country which often finds itself, as was the case last summer, in retributive cycles of attack and counterattack with those very terrorists from which it is difficult to extract itself.

In my NYJB review I also point out that although Hebrew is a more concise language than English the two editions are the same number of pages. What, I wonder, is missing in the English edition? In the Jerusalem Report interview Hareven reveals that at least two sections of the novel contain literary allusions that non-Hebrew readers will not get, and so she decided to omit them from the English edition. Local Hebrew readers can find three copies of the Hebrew edition (ha-Shekarim ha-aharonim shel ha-guf) in Brooklyn Public Library. For English readers BPL has ordered eight copies, and New York Public Library has ordered ten copies. With so many ideas and emotions to discuss, Lies, First Person is an excellent choice for book groups.

[Jill Meyer]

Do we forgive evil or do we destroy it? And if we destroy it, are we not also acting evilly? Israeli author Gail Hareven's second novel printed in English, "Lies, First Person", asks those questions and the answers are often difficult to accept. And sometimes difficult to believe.

Elinor and Elisheva Gotthilf were raised in a pension owned by their parents in Jerusalem. Elinor was the younger and definitely the smarter of the two; Elisheva was thought to be "slow". Their parents were flaky as as their daughters' upbringing in the hotel. During their teen years, a cousin of Shaya Gotthilf - Aaron Gotthilf - came to visit and spent a few months at the pension, working on his newest book, "Hitler, First Person", a purported "autobiography" of Adolf Hitler. Considered after its publication in Europe and the United States to be a disgrace - a Jewish man trying to get into Hitler's mind - Aaron Gotthilf was shunned. However, along with writing a novel about Hitler during his stay at the Gotthilf's pension, Aaron was also raping and abusing the older, slower, Gotthilf sister, Elisheva.

When the parents found out about the abuse of their daughter by a trusted relative, the family fell apart. The mother died of heart failure, perhaps as a suicide. The father fled Jerusalem for Italy, leaving the badly emotionally damaged Elisheva in the care of Elinor. After a couple of stays in a local mental hospital, Elisheva was recovered enough to marry an American Christian veterinarian and moving with him to the US and becoming a Christian evangelical. Elinor met and married a lawyer from a solid family and her in-laws became her loving parents. She had two sons with Oded and became a writer of note. But the pain Aaron Gotthilf inflicted on the family never left Elinor's mind. But, how had Elisheva coped with her pain?

The book begins with Aaron Gotthilf making contact with Elinor and Oded thirty years after the molestation. He's coming to speak at a seminar in Jerusalem and would like to meet with Elinor. She also realises that he wants to contact Elisheva, now living in central Illinois. Elinor and Oded travel to the US to see Elisheva and tell her about Aaron Gotthilf popping up again in their lives. Elisheva tells Elinor that she has "forgiven" Aaron for the rape and abuse. It was the "Christian" thing to do. But what does Elinor do?

Aaron Gotthilf is an evil person. Personally he is evil for what he did to a young girl, and on a societal level he is evil for the book he has written. Author Gail Hareven writes the rest of the book using an "unreliable narrator" as the voice. It's not a writing tactic that I particularly like; to me it's sort of taking the easy way out of plot development. "Maybe this happened...and maybe it didn't". Hareven says as much in her prologue. However, Gail Hareven's novel is interesting reading and I can recommend it for the reader who wants to know about evil and it's aftermath.

[Tonymess]

I have absolutely no idea why I put this work to one side when it arrived on my doorstep in February this year. Maybe the blurb on the back cover talking about “Jewish diaspora”, and “Hitler” simply didn’t appeal right then, maybe I was simply snowed under. I can tell you that I am disappointed in myself for not picking this book up earlier, it is the highlight of my Women In Translation Month this year.

To make things easier, I’ll start with the plot, our narrator, Elinor, is a writer, and she writes a newspaper column from the viewpoint of the fictional Alice (from Alaska), her column focuses on Jerusalem, everything through the eyes of somebody who is awestruck, she came here to paint the light. All the sordid details are left aside as Alice wonders at her colourful, rich surroundings.

Elinor had a tough upbringing, living in a hotel with her prescription drug addicted mother, her ineffectual father and her older sister Elisheva, but more on her later.
Very early on, as a reader we start to question ourselves, are we reading Elinor here or are we reading Alice?

My pigtail-sucking Alice is a perfect idiot and a chronic faker. She isn’t capable of producing a single straightforward sentence, and her description of my childhood is, of course, completely false. That’s what she’s like, that’s how I created her, and I take full responsibility for her falsifications and for the small pleasures they afforded me.
But what about my own account? Is it truer? More reliable? Was my childhood really as grim as I describe it? Were the no moments of grace in it? No dewy lawns of happiness?

But back to the plot, Elinor is contacted by her Uncle Aaron Gotthilf, as he is coming to visit Jerusalem to apologise for his controversial book “Hitler, First Person”. A work where he attempted to inhabit the mind of Hitler, a work he wrote whilst staying with Elinor, her mother, father and sister at their hotel when our narrator was a child, a time when Aaron continually raped Elinor’s older sister Elisheva.

For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/20...

[Patrick]

Putting down this book I couldn't shake a sense that I had been deceived. In the same way Elinor feels her mind taken over by the cancerous evil of "The First Person, The Not-Man," I felt that I had been spun in circles and forced to give up my own moral code, almost without realizing. I forgave a murder, but not just that, I didn't question it -- I had been so convinced by the narrator's pounding reinforcement of Aaron's evil, and by my desire to see a quite likable character made well, that I, like her husband, found myself cheering on the killing of an old, realistically almost harmless man, and wanting it to be sped up, made even more final. Unlike the central event of The Stranger, this killing felt chillingly explicable -- as though, had I been there, I would have been complicit.

As this reaction shows, Gail Hereven has created a wonderfully detailed book meant to provoke questions about all sorts of thin lines -- between good and evil, choice and necessity, author and subject, reader and participant -- but it does so in a way that feels fresh and in no way "tricky." That Hereven was able to find a new take on this admittedly worn out subjects is a testament to her inventiveness and dedication. That said, while I felt the impact this book had on me personally was enormous (disclaimer: I happen to live in the exact part of Illinois in which the middle of the book takes place), I did leave feeling that certain ideas could have been reinforced, and that certain aspects of the style could have been tied better in with the plot. It felt as though a few ideas just made it, but I'm not sure if I got every bit of what Hereven was going for. Maybe my next reading -- which I will hopefully find time to begin soon -- will help make everything clear for me.

[Sandy]

"The Not Man", "the bottom feeder", "that creep", "the insolent creep", "the serpent", "the pollution", "the ha, ha uncle", "the being disguised as the boring old grandfather." This is how Elinor describes the well known, distinguished professor who raped her sister, Elisheva, while living in the family's pension in Jerusalem. It is there that he penned the book, Hitler, First Person. As a Jew from a family of Holocaust survivors, his book is particularly controversial, but his proclivity towards rape is unknown to all but the 2 sisters. Lies, First Person poses the question: Do we forgive evil or do we destroy it? Elisheva, the victim, forgives him; her sister does not and plots revenge. This is a good book and cleverly written, but I found it frustrating. You know soon on that Elinor wants revenge. You don't know if, or how, or if she's even capable of doing it. Elinor's obsession takes years to unfold and slowly takes hold of her being. I wanted him tormented, tortured and done with, and I wanted it after page 40. Apparently I'm not of the forgiveness of evil persuasion. Does she do it? The last chapter begins: "One infinitely sweet Sabbath. The fragrance of figs bursting with ripeness fills the inner courtyard of the house. Clouds filter the gold of the sun between the leaves of our grapevine pergola." Is this peacefulness about forgiveness or the completion of the destruction of evil?

[Aaron (Typographical Era)]

What is the true definition of the word normal? Merriam-Webster defines it as meaning “mentally and physically healthy” but who among us is to serve as the baseline for measuring this statistic? At some point, without fail, everyone becomes inexplicably changed, damaged, and/or has their worldview altered significantly by events that transpire in their lives. What’s acceptable to one person may be considered highly objectionable to another. What one person believes to be true may be thought of as pure fantasy by someone else. Are we all mentally ill then? Certainly we’ don’t all fall within the acceptable range of being normal. Whatever that is. Whatever that word is supposed to mean.

Mental illness, or an absence of normality if you will, plays a heavy role in this meticulously plotted and perfectly paced tale of family dysfunction. In fact, from very first page Hareven’s protagonist Elinor makes no attempts to disguise from us that she is the very epitome of an unreliable narrator. Just how damaged she’s become however, how traumatized she’s been by events that occurred in her past, and just how far she’s willing to go to even the score in this regard, won’t become crystal clear until much, much later.

READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/lies-...

[Philip Shaw]

More like 3.5 or 4.25. I wish goodreads allowed half-ish stars. The story was compelling, if even a bit adrift at times. I can appreciate adrift. I really, really love adrift. However, in this case no paddles were provided and to find that we were always connected with a soggy line under the water and that the author could just tug and we'd come shooting back, left me unsatisfied at times. I did enjoy thinking about the translation, a lot, as I was reading. Based on my unlearned experience – which counts for nothing in these cases – I believe it to be a solid work of translation. That said, Open Letter... COME ON! Beautiful books, good-to-great translations, interesting writers... ya think you could splurge on a proofreader!?! Seriously. It was comic, at times. Or sad. As if no one at Open Letter bothered to read this beautiful book. They should have. Anyone would have caught the dozens of edits necessary.

[Olga]

With sincere apologies to the friend who recommended this...
I found this book pretentious, tedious, verbose. Only finished it out of loyalty and respect to the friend.
Too many "books within a book". Too much pretense at depth. Author attempted to reveal the nature of evil with allusions to Hitler, Stalin, Marquis de Sade etc. I did not find anything new or worth the trouble in her "analyses".
Even the fact that the critical scene takes place at Allerton Park, which brought back very pleasant memories to me, did not reconcile me with this book... I could not wait to be done with it.

[nogaboga]

There was a lot that I really liked about this book, and it kept me interested and curious throughout. I find myself pretty ambivalent about the language though. The same little tricks that make it sophisticated, are often too transparent in their attempt to be smart and witty. I would have preferred the sophistication to be hidden better and not so in-your-face.

[Chad Post]

DISCLAIMER: I am the publisher of the book and thus spent approximately two years reading and editing and working on it. So take my review with a grain of salt, or the understanding that I am deeply invested in this text and know it quite well. Also, I would really appreciate it if you would purchase this book, since it would benefit Open Letter directly.

[Peter Biello]

In this novel, the first person narrator gains my sympathy even when I'm not quite sure if she's telling the truth. The complexity of it was intriguing. I was also expecting to see how the dark side of this "Notman" was actually not as dark as she made it out to be, but I didn't quite see that, and I think that's probably a good thing because it steers the book away from simplicity.

[Eugenia]

Maddening convolution.

[Rel]

Re-reading a favorite book about obsession. The first page still kills me.

[The Jewish Book Council]

Review by Elise Cooper for the Jewish Book Council.

[Rachel]

See my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...