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Love Is in the Mail
Matt Nesvisky
THE PREMISE OF DAVID Grossman�s latest novel to appear in English (it was originally published in Hebrew in 1998) is intriguing, if also somewhat shaky. Thirty-three-year-old Yair, a married man with a young son, spots the slightly older Miriam, who is also married and has a child, at a social occasion in Jerusalem. For want of a better word, Yair is smitten. But exactly what smites our hero is not entirely clear.
Yair does not speak to Miriam, but next day writes her a letter. In it he declares: "I don�t want to meet you or interfere with your day-to-day life in any way, but I would like you to agree to receive my letters. That is -- to let me tell you about myself in letters now and again. Not that my life is so interesting (it�s not, and I�m not complaining), but I want to give you things I can�t give to anybody else� There�s no point to this if I have to explain it�"
Now how one might react to receiving such a letter might indicate how one might react to this novel. Indeed, how one might react to receiving such a letter just might be a judgment on oneself, and that is only the first of many cunning conjurations the justly acclaimed Israeli novelist has fashioned into this mixed bag of a book.
OK, so Yair�s letter is decidedly offbeat and even disconcerting. But remember, all he has requested is Miriam�s agreement to accept his communications. Would that junk-mailers and telemarketers were so considerate. At any rate, he�s vowed not to bother her. And he has held out a promise of rewards designed for her and her alone.
Miriam writes back, cautiously we would presume, saying she agrees to accept his letters. Whereupon Yair immediately responds:
"Dear Miriam, Ever since I got your letter, I haven�t done a single thing -- I can�t -- can�t work, can�t live my life, I�ve just been running circles around you, howling out your name. If you were here right now, I would hold on to you with all my strength; everything I�m feeling would tear us both to pieces�"
Now it�s your move. How would you respond to this letter, with its alternating currents of inertia and violence? Me, I�d probably request an unlisted address, maybe even put in a discreet call to the Shin Bet. But Yair evidently knows a penpal when he sees one. Soon enough Miriam takes up her felt-tip and begins matching Yair letter for letter, outpouring for outpouring, pent-up cry for pent-up cry.
Of course she does; had Hamlet carried out his vow and whacked Claudius right there in Act I we�d have no play. Conversely, if Miriam failed to write there�d be no "Be My Knife." But aside from that, just why Miriam agrees to correspond remains inexplicable, for in what is perhaps his shrewdest gambit Grossman allows us only Yair�s letters, never Miriam�s. The effect of this for the reader is akin to overhearing an especially emotional cell phone conversation, the sort of discourse all the more compelling -- and exasperating -- because we are privy to the voice of only one of its two participants.
In this sense the reader views the silent Miriam through a veil, or perhaps through seven veils. As months of correspondence go by (The postage! Haven�t these folks heard of e-mail?), Yair reveals more and more of his present circumstance, his background and the like. Yet all this time we see Miriam only through Yair�s eyes. And Yair�s vision is not the clearest, because as is made increasingly evident throughout the story, if Yair wasn�t half-cracked at the outset of this epistolary dalliance, he�s becoming crazier with each passing day.
At one point, for example, he admits he has come to Miriam�s house at night and, despite the presence of her three dogs, danced around the house seven times in the nude. At another, he moves to a sleazy Tel Aviv hotel, papers the walls of his room with Miriam�s letters and, in general, acts like a candidate for a padded cell. In another instance, Yair actually begins writing in Miriam�s voice, which suggests two polar propositions: first, that Yair is subsuming himself into Miriam�s mind, or second, that she existed only in his mind in the first place.
PERHAPS REASONABLY ENOUGH it�s at this point that Yair breaks off his correspondence altogether. The story then resumes with some pages from Miriam�s diary. The considerate reviewer refrains from imparting any further information, since the entire engine of the novel is fueled by the teasing out of information about these characters. But let it be said that the third and final section of the novel constitutes a conclusion of near-breathtaking excitement and emotion.
That conclusion is no small tribute to David Grossman�s many skills, though to this point excitement and emotion have been in short supply. Despite all of Yair�s pumped-up prose and self-induced fevers, much of "Be My Knife" is dense, static when not circuitous, and at times tiresome.
One reason for this resides in the choice of a narrator who is not only unreliable but eminently abnormal. Crazy people, even gentle, well-meaning crazy people, do tend to become wearying in their neurotic self-absorption. And to be sure, Yair, who at first is self-deprecating and self-aware, is soon enough hyperventilating into the dizziest heights of erotic imagination and language. A mild example:
"Write me now what is happening in your heart, which was filled with a longing for its young self. And all at once you pull me to you, harder, and kiss me with all your soul and all your heart, as if they will give and pour out into me; your entire being, created and encoded within your flesh, will open and be solved in me, bit by bit, until the whole thing melts, that Thing between you and yourself -- that is now a little bit of the Thing between you and me."
Moreover, our narrator frequently describes at considerable length his dreams and fantasies, two things that, unless you are a shrink paid to analyze such things, are rarely of as much interest to the hearer as they are to the teller.
Yet another problem is that for all his great gifts, Grossman does tend, rather self-consciously, to aim for High Literature. This is evident to anyone who knows "See Under: Love," "The Book of Intimate Grammar" and Grossman�s other rewarding yet demanding fictions. It will come as no surprise therefore to discover that the enclosed and claustrophobic world of "Be My Knife" is studded with references to other writers, most often modernists -- Woolf, Eliot, Flaubert, Nabokov, Joyce and above all Kafka -- all too capable of creating hermetic literary constructs.
It will also come as no surprise to Grossman�s readers that childhood figures largely in Yair�s story. And the world of children, rather like the sci-fi worlds of other alien species, interests me a lot less than it does David Grossman. But that�s a judgment on this reader, not on this author.
In his latest novel, so ably translated by Vera Almog and Maya Gurant, Grossman has accomplished an admirable if peculiar achievement. And indeed, I found myself admiring, if not always enjoying, "Be My Knife." But be my guest: if you relish this sort of high concept literary tease of a tale, this novel will render up its rewards.
l (April 22, 2002)
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