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Books: Varieties of Painful Experience
Matt Nesvisky
"Bliss," a bestseller in Hebrew three years ago under the title "Sarah, Sarah," is an artful novel constructed around a subject all but worked to death in recent fiction: the friendship between women. But the overly familiar topic didn�t bother me in the least. This guy finds sympathy between women wondrous and enviable, and in the accomplished hands of the Israeli writer Ronit Matalon, "Bliss" proves to be a deeply absorbing piece of work.
Not that narrator Ofra and her lifelong friend Sarah ever experience anything like bliss. No, when a novel is set in contemporary Israel, you can assume such a title is offered with a strong measure of irony. At the same time I can�t think of a single word that adequately covers the varieties of pain and anguish these two women experience.
For her part, Ofra is something of a cipher. She�s an unmarried and bespectacled doctoral student of art history. She has an extended family, and much of the novel involves her trip to France to attend the funeral of a beloved cousin who died of AIDS. Yet Ofra essentially has no life of her own. Instead, she lives, as she has since childhood, through the life of her magnetic if perplexing friend Sarah. Sarah has always been a puzzlement. As a schoolgirl she was free-spirited but troubled, resentful of her family�s wealth, caring toward the less fortunate Ofra and so sensitive that we�re told she "went about in the world as if she had no skin." Now Sarah is married to the patient but obtuse Udi. She has a child with whom she cannot bond. She�s a professional photographer who dumps most of her work into a drawer. Above all, she�s being driven crazy by what she sees as Israel�s oppression of the Palestinians and by the public�s passive acceptance of Palestinian suffering.
So Sarah is a peace activist and a human rights campaigner. Eventually she embarks on an obsessive and doomed love affair with an Israeli Arab named Marwan. This is an adulterous adventure that Sarah could not undertake without the disapproving complicity of Ofra as ever-available babysitter, housekeeper and confidante.
"Life went on," Ofra notes with rueful irony. "Friday night dinner -- one week at his parents, the next week at hers; ordering groceries from the supermarket over the phone; Marwan; a Chanukah party at Mims�s kindergarten; switching from one health insurance to another; a picnic in Ben-Shemen forest one Saturday with Dorit, Meir and Shelly; Sarah�s redecoration schemes; Marwan; Shmulik�s hospitalization in the middle of the night, a possible heart attack; a meeting at Bir-Zeit University in Ramallah with activists from Palestinian women�s organizations; a new bike without training wheels for Mims; Marwan; Udi�s business trips to Santa Cruz, California, plans for a long stay; a fight with the neighbor from the ground floor over the co-op dues; a six-thousand-mile maintenance service for the car; Marwan."
So there it is: The occupation drives Sarah crazy and Sarah in turn makes Ofra meshuga. Why should the reader care? How can we not care when we observe such heartache -- especially in a setting in which Matalon makes caring and commitment the virtual definition of being human?
This is not to say Matalon makes everything so easy for us. The chief challenge is a narrative so fragmented one almost suspects the pages were shuffled like a deck of cards before they were sent to the printer. This is one of those novels in which characters, events and images are introduced only to be identified or explained 15 or 50 pages later -- if ever. Who is the baroness? Why is Sarah covered with bruises? Why is Marwan covering his face with greasepaint? Hang on -- the explanation is probably coming. But why these delays?
"The units of time," Ofra reflects, "arrange themselves before me in various permutations, like Lego blocks of different sizes and colors. Unable to choose one principle of organization and order, I waver or skip among them. I find it particularly difficult to arrive at precise measurements of duration and quantity; scenes that lasted only a few hours stretch out over years in my memory; years squeeze into the blink of an eye." Well, no surprise Ofra�s difficulties become the reader�s as well.
Nor is Matalon entirely well served by her translator, who in general is supple but who also allows clich�s ("hit the nail on the head," "avoid them like the plague") to come a-tumbling one after the other. Sometimes these locutions yield unintended chuckles, as in: "The Israeli national airline aroused great excitement in him, and he took it under his wing."
But in the main, reading "Bliss" is a moving experience, often confounding, often sad, occasionally inspiring, always engaging. That�s rather like friendship itself -- or for that matter, like Israel.
Bliss: Ronit Matalon, Translated by Jessica Cohen, 262 pp.; $23
October 20, 2003
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