The Jerusalem Report Magazine: Books : Books Article

Click for Contents

Click here to subscribe to The Jerusalem Report

P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017
Tel. 972-2-531-5440,
Fax: 972-2-537-9489
Advertising Fax:
972-2-531-5425,
Email Editorial: [email protected]
Subscriptions: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.jrep.com

Like Agnon, without the Profundity
Matt Nesvisky

A.B. Yehoshua has said his latest novel was inspired by Israel�s only winner of the Literature Nobel. That might not be such a good thing.

As he approaches his 70s, A.B. Yehoshua is arguably the grand old man of modern Hebrew literature. Even persistent rumors of his being considered for the Nobel Prize abound. Yehoshua in fact is frequently compared to the American Nobel laureate William Faulkner. Yet in recent interviews, Yehoshua maintains his latest novel was most deeply influenced by the work of another grand old literary man and (to date) Israel�s only Nobel Prize winner in literature, S.Y. Agnon. That is not necessarily good news.

Although very much grounded in the Israel of the early 1990s, "The Liberated Bride" is a dreamily discursive book that very much recalls Agnon. Yehoshua�s protagonist even digressively visits Agnon�s Jerusalem home, which is now a museum. Yet while Agnon�s mythic tales seem weighted with symbolism in every detail, little suggestion of profundity lurks in "The Liberated Bride." The key to much of Agnon�s meaning is said to be in his allusively rich Hebrew. This is why Agnon in English translation often fails to "come across." Something like that may be happening in "The Liberated Bride." Or maybe it�s something worse.

"The Liberated Bride" is certainly a busy work of fiction, and like all of Yehoshua�s work it is eminently readable. Yet the novel is also eminently disappointing.

The central peg on which this long and languorous story is hung is a puny peg indeed. Yochanan Rivlin, like the author, is a Jerusalem-born Sephardi of late middle age and a professor at Haifa University. (Rivlin�s appointment is in history, Yehoshua�s in literature.) All is well with the amiable, rather weak-willed Rivlin, with one exception: The man cannot understand why, five years before the novel begins, his son Ofer and daughter-in-law Galya abruptly divorced after one year of marriage. This mystery, which the young people refuse to discuss with him, obsesses Rivlin and threatens to disrupt his otherwise even-keeled existence.

This "mystery," however, does not obsess the reader. Since we rarely get to see Ofer and Galya, we�re hardly ensnared by their old problems. Moreover, midway through the novel, Yehoshua reveals to the reader the cause of the divorce. And in any event, so much else is going on in Rivlin�s life that his obsession with the mystery often gets lost in the shuffle.

What else is going on in Rivlin�s life? You name it. There�s a subplot, for example, concerning one of Rivlin�s Arab students and her inability to complete her MA. There�s another concerning an ailing old mentor of Rivlin�s in Jerusalem. Dozens of other characters walk off shortly after they walk on. There�s Rivlin�s sister Hagit and there�s Hagit�s ex-husband. There�s another son who pops in and out of the story every 100 pages or so, as does an aunt in an old-age home. There are numerous Arabs and their extended families.

And there�s constant movement. Rivlin travels to the West Bank for intercommunal concerts where we meet, among others, a singing nun. (This is the 1990s, remember, in the optimistic flush of the Oslo Accords but before the current intifada.) Rivlin makes innumerable runs to the airport to pick up or drop off relatives. He visits the theater, an art exhibition, concerts, weddings. Rivlin drives a lot, or is driven about by an Israeli Arab friend. Rivlin jousts with fellow professors. Rivlin goes to a Japanese film and dozes off. (The reader nearly does the same.) Rivlin struggles to complete a book about Algerian politics. Rivlin writes letters to the traffic bureau. Rivlin shops.

In short, this is the most amorphous tale A.B. Yehoshua has ever written. Much of it is interesting, but at the same time one can�t help wondering where -- if anywhere -- all this is going. For instance, an aside on the horrors of moving from one Haifa apartment to another is terrifically funny; a lengthy visit later on to the new occupants of the old apartment is utterly pointless. Several of the subplots -- Rivlin�s concern for his ex-daughter-in-law�s family, the struggling Arab student, the Israeli-Palestinian d�tente -- have only the vaguest of thematic links. Too often whole chunks of the novel seem to have simply popped into the writer�s head. In a similar fashion some of Yehoshua�s vocabulary has challenged his estimable translator Hillel Halkin as never before. The result is such tongue-twisting locutions as "bewilderedly," "revoltedly," "remissness," "shelterer" -- and the repeated reference to a female translator as a "translatoress."

Indeed, long before one character lights his cigar, on page 494, and then stubs out his cigarette, on page 495, the reader�s suspicion is confirmed: Yehoshua evidently wrote "The Liberated Bride" in much the way the British allegedly assembled their empire: in a fit of absentmindedness.

This is an enigma. In his 1998 novel, "A Journey to the End of the Millennium," Yehoshua recreated the Jewish world in the year 1000 C.E. with stunning verisimilitude. In the novel before that, "Open Heart" (1996), Yehoshua convincingly set much of his contemporary love story in India, a country he had never visited. But there�s no getting around it: "The Liberated Bride" is a rambling, unfocused, even sloppy book, less the work of a grand old man than of a garrulous old grandpa.