"Astonishing . . . galvanic and intoxicating." -The New Yorker Fima lives in Jerusalem, but feels he ought to be somewhere else. In his life he has had secret love affairs, good ideas, and written a book of poems that aroused expectations. He has thought about the purpose of the universe and where the country lost its way. He has felt longings of all sorts, and the constant desire to pen a new chapter. And here he is now, in his early fifties in a shabby apartment on a gloomy wet morning, engaged in a humiliating struggle to release his shirt from the zipper of his fly. With wit and insight, Amos Oz portrays a man-and a generation-dreaming noble dreams but doing nothing. "One of Oz's most memorable fictional creations . . . Fima is a cross between Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Joyce's Leopold Bloom." - Washington Post
AMOS OZ (1939-2018) was born in Jerusalem. He was the recipient of the Prix Femina, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other international honors. His work, including A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel, has been translated into forty-four languages.
Show more"Astonishing . . . galvanic and intoxicating." -The New Yorker Fima lives in Jerusalem, but feels he ought to be somewhere else. In his life he has had secret love affairs, good ideas, and written a book of poems that aroused expectations. He has thought about the purpose of the universe and where the country lost its way. He has felt longings of all sorts, and the constant desire to pen a new chapter. And here he is now, in his early fifties in a shabby apartment on a gloomy wet morning, engaged in a humiliating struggle to release his shirt from the zipper of his fly. With wit and insight, Amos Oz portrays a man-and a generation-dreaming noble dreams but doing nothing. "One of Oz's most memorable fictional creations . . . Fima is a cross between Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Joyce's Leopold Bloom." - Washington Post
AMOS OZ (1939-2018) was born in Jerusalem. He was the recipient of the Prix Femina, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other international honors. His work, including A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel, has been translated into forty-four languages.
Show moreAMOS OZ (1939-2018) was born in Jerusalem. He was the recipient of the Prix Femina, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other international honors. His work, including A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel, has been translated into forty-four languages.
In Oz's new novel (after To Know a Woman , LJ 2/1/91), brilliant, pathetic, naive, dyspeptic Efraim (Fima) Nisan wanders through his Jerusalem life like an irritating shopper in a department store. Fima published a highly regarded book of poems in his salad days but has since lapsed into a dreary existence of intellectual and political quarreling; his brilliance gets on everyone's nerves almost as much as his inability to manage his life properly. He now works as a receptionist at a gynecological clinic and has puzzling affairs with women whose husbands have lost interest in them. Throughout the book, Fima makes plans to see a Jean Gabin film, but when he finally gets to the theater, it has come and gone. Oz uses his protagonist's arguments and fantasies of becoming prime minister to convey the confused and confusing mixture of political and personal life in his homeland. A fine work by one of Israel's best writers.-- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
In what is surely his best book since The Black Box , the Israeli author writes a stirring tale in which one man's emotional disintegration mirrors the ethical breakdown of the Jewish state. Oz uses his eponymous protagonist to indict what he sees as the ineptitude of the Israeli government and the foolishness of the intelligentsia. Efraim ``Fima'' Nisan, sometime poet, sometime journalist, full-time dreamer, polemicist, philosopher and receptionist at a Jerusalem gynecological clinic, has made a mess of what was once a promising life. Twice divorced, supported mainly by gifts from his loving father, he bumbles through his days in an absentminded fog interrupted by long interior monologues and obsessive verbal diatribes in which he rails against the corruption of Israeli values. Contemplating the occupation of the Territories, Fima goes almost mad with moral outrage, taking upon himself the moral conscience of the nation. Fima is semihysterical, delusional and exasperating; yet the morally centered source of his anguish--the frenzy with which he searches for ethical answers and for emotional fulfillment (though a bumbler, he manages to sleep with several women)--makes him quite endearing. The novel teems with ideas hurled at a frantic pace, and with dialogue that argues and counter-argues the essential issues of Jewish history. Instead of the detached stance and elliptical technique he has maintained in recent novels, Oz sustains a high level of intellectual and emotional energy here as he writes with fierce passion and comic brio. (Oct.)
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