SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua creates a surprising novel of ideas which ranges widely, as it examines such issues as reality vs. the recreation of reality through art and film and myth; life, as opposed to the afterlife, and whether the afterlife is real or an imagined fantasy; the actualities of the past vs. memories of the past; the concept of guilt and whether one can atone; and the many aspects of love – love and death, love and hatred, love and jealousy – as it controls our actions (and even our politics). The story line itself is not complicated. Famous Israeli director Yair Moses has received an unexpected invitation to attend a retrospective of his films to be held in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. He arrives with Ruth, an aging actress whom he regards more as a character in his films than as a real person. The films to be shown are all his earliest films, each made with the help of a brilliant screenwriter, Shaul Trigano, one of his students. The novel is rich in detail, ideas, and symbolism, and the author’s narrative is both energizing to the reader and exciting in its possibilities. Like so many other novels of ideas, however, it subordinates characters and their lives to the overall structure in order to clarify and illustrate philosophical and thematic ideas. As a result, the characters become vehicles, rather than living, breathing “humans” as they move in and out of their films and their “reality,” which is, of course, reality as depicted in an imaginative and unusual piece of fiction.

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Some dear friends operated a bookshop for ten years in a very small town – about a thousand people – at the “end of the road” in a very rural area. As it was the only bookshop for over fifty miles, people drove long distances to see what they had in the shop, mostly used books in good condition, though they carried some new books, too. The owners had already retired from their first careers when they opened the book shop, and it quickly became a second career. After ten years of full-time work there, however, they finally decided to close the shop and operate from their home, selling their inventory on-line. And when it was time to move from their large home to a smaller one, the time also arrived to sell the remaining inventory. A huge book sale, held at their house a few weeks ago, lessened the collection significantly, but when the sale of the remaining books to one buyer fell through, they then decided to sell everything else as fast as possible. That meant that they weren’t really going to be selling the books at all. They were going to give them away! Anything you could carry, you could have free…

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