Synopses & Reviews
From the internationally acclaimed author of
Mr. Mani and
A Woman in Jerusalem, a thrilling novel that explores the relationship between life and art through the eyes of a film director, his screenwriter, and their muse. An aging film director named Yair Moses has been invited to the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel, Moses notices the painting over his bed,
Caritas Romana, depicting a classical legend of a starving old prisoner man nursing at the breast of his daughter. For the first time in decades, he recalls the infamous scene from one of his early films which led to his estrangement from his difficult but brilliant screenwriter, Trigano, Ruths former lover.
Throughout the retrospective, Moses is unsettled, straddling the past and the present, and upon his return to Israel, he decides to travel to the south to find the elusive Trigano and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for such a reconciliation, one that will have strange and lasting consequences.
Searching, intellectual, and original, The Retrospective is a probing meditation on mortality, the limits of memory, and the struggle of artistic creation by one of the worlds most esteemed writers
Review
PRAISE FOR
A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM "[An] astonishing new novel . . . Like sacred music, the deepest chords resound."John Leonard,
Harper's Magazine "[A] masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion."Warren Bass,
The Washington Post Book World Review
"Fascinating...beautiful."-Ha'ir, Israel
Review
"Yehoshua's intelligent and refined novel. . . about an aging Israeli director reviewing both his films and his life. . . recalls once again Faulkner's famous dictum that 'the past isn't dead. It isn't even past.'"
—Kirkus (starred review)
"Fascinating...beautiful."-Ha'ir, Israel
Review
Winner, 2012 Prix Médicis étrangerWinner, 2012 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
"[Yehoshua] achieves an autumnal tone as he ruminates on memorys slippery hold on life and on art."—The New Yorker
"Yehoshuas prose penetrated to a level of psychological understanding that moved me deeply. . . [His] stories remind us that Israeli literature rightly joins the literature of those other cultures that have earned the right to make of ordinary lives a metaphor for such soul-destroying weariness."—Vivian Gornick, The Nation
"An ambitious, engrossing, playfully testamentary novel."—Moment
"A pure pleasure. . . Yehoshua's best book in years."—Maariv (Israel)
"Genius. . . In The Retrospective, Yehoshua evokes the complexities of growing old — for men and women, and for a country that is no longer fledgling — and the entrapments of regrets and broken memories that make it hard to part 'from what might have been but was not.'"—Jewish Daily Forward
"Yehoshua is concerned with the inadequacies in our quotidian sense of history, our inability to comprehend its violent grandeur. Though the history he has in mind may be Jewish and Israeli, the final words of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man may apply: 'Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?'"—Robert Pinsky, New York Times Book Review
"The Retrospective is intelligent, sensitive fiction . . . In his inimitable style, Yehoshua crafts a powerful and engaging allegory of modern Israeli Jewish identity. "—Haaretz
"Yehoshua delivers a stunning explanation of the ethics of art. . . A fluid and absorbing novel of ideas; highly recommended."—Library Journal, starred review
"A truly international book, a serious set of reflections about coming to terms with the past—with a surprising ending. . . His recent novels have a wonderful restraint, an increasingly elegiac feel."—Jewish Chronicle
"Yehoshua's intelligent and refined novel. . . about an aging Israeli director reviewing both his films and his life. . . recalls once again Faulkner's famous dictum that 'the past isn't dead. It isn't even past.'"—Kirkus, starred review
"With beautiful wordsmanship, Yehoshua entangles dignity and humiliation, repugnance and rapture, showing us how difficult they become to distinguish."—Booklist
"A compelling meditation on art, memory, love, guilt… A hugely pleasurable read, it shows that in his seventies, A. B. Yehoshua is still producing some of his best work."—Independent (UK)
"Fascinating. . . Beautiful."—Ha'ir (Israel)
"Richly plotted."—Jewish Week
Review
PRAISE FOR A. B. YEHOSHUA
"A master storyteller whose tales reveal the inner life of a vital, conflicted nation."-The Wall Street Journal
"Wherever this innovative, erudite, suggestive, mysterious writer-a true master of contemporary fiction-points us, there can be no doubt, it is essential that we go."-The Washington Post
Review
PRAISE FOR A. B. YEHOSHUA
"Wherever this innovative, erudite, suggestive, mysterious writer-a true master of contemporary fiction-points us, there can be no doubt, it is essential that we go."-THE WASHINGTON POST
"Extraordinary . . . Yehoshua is so graceful and eloquent that his work's timeliness also succeeds, paradoxically, in making it timeless."
-THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Review
"A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM is a book about a mission and a memorial...But while the novel is always aware of the sorrows of modern Israel, it soars on wry, wise wings far above the battered landscape...The result is a small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion."
Review
"This mysterious, quiet meditation on Jerusalem is, I think, about something much greater [than Israel's "problems and identity."] The manager . . . trying to make some meaning of . . . pointless, violent death, as all the structures of his own life fall apart around him, is a figure much bigger and much sadder than even the horrific reality of Israel can suggest."
Review
PRAISE FOR FIVE SEASONS
"A wonderfully engaging, exquisitely controlled, luminous work." -The Washington Post Book World
"[An] extraordinary novel . . . A masterpiece."-Los Angeles Times
"Fiction that matters. Yehoshua continues to give us evidence in abundance that his reign as one of Israel's most distinguished writers is likely to be a long one indeed."-The Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
PRAISE FOR A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM"The force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece . . . embedded in this simple story are fundamental questions about identity, selfhood, belonging."CLAIRE MESSUD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW"A sad, warm, funny book . . . that has deep lessons to impart."THE ECONOMIST
Review
"Yehoshua is examining a deeper question: what does it mean to be human--humane--especially during troubled times? 'When Jerusalem is burning, does any of this matter?' The answer for both the author and his main character seems to be: 'more than ever.'"
Review
"The author beautifully renders a humanity that transcends culture and ritual, the distinctly personal engagement of a lonely man and the woman in his care, no obstacle too great in a quest for the fulfillment of a promise."
Review
"[An] astonishing new novel...Like sacred music, the deepest chords resound."
Review
"A moving, unsentimental reckoning with death and renewal."
Review
"[T]he writing is beautifully exact and the moral issues delivered with an understated authority."
Review
"An elegantly structured, thoroughly accessible story, albeit one with rich philosophical layers...A WOMAN moves us with deep insights into the meaning of home, belonging and the fate of the stranger."
Review
New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of the Year."
Review
"This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece: terse, eminently readable but resonantly dense."
Review
Publisher's Weekly "Best Books of the Year" list.
Review
"What engages Mr. Yehoshua most here is the question of humanity...Yet his evocation of what it means to be human is drawn in the subtlest strokes...A sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart--for other people as well as his own."
Review
"Compelling reading...[A Woman in Jerusalem] is a realistic tale of everyday life in Israel, gracefully told, that sometimes has a mythic quality; at other times it is playful."
Review
PRAISE FOR THE LIBERATED BRIDE
"Yehoshua, the most daring of the major Israeli writers, tells a simple story about a region that complicates all it touches . . . [and] remains, somehow, hopeful."-The New Yorker
"The Liberated Bride is a magnificent, often comic, and humanely inexorable journey among Israel's Jews and their secret and denied sharers: the Arabs. . . .Yehoshua, who is 70 and a dove, has written a novel that incarnates the message to extraordinary literary effect." -The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Amotz, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniella, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of mans primate ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.
With great artistry, A. B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.
Synopsis
From the acclaimed author of A Woman in Jerusalem, a novel about a director, a screenwriter and an actress, old friends and colleagues who meet up for the first time in decades in Santiago de Compostela, and are forced to face the demons that undid them years before, and the ones haunting them now.
Synopsis
Winner, Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
An aging Israeli film director has been invited to the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his work. When Yair Moses and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel room, a painting over their bed triggers a distant memory in Moses from one of his early films: a scene that caused a rift with his brilliant but difficult screenwriter—who, as it happens, was once Ruths lover. Upon their return to Israel, Moses decides to travel to the south to look for his elusive former partner and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for it that will have strange and lasting consequences.
A searching and original novel by one of the worlds most esteemed writers, The Retrospective is a meditation on mortality and intimacy, on the limits of memory and the struggle of artistic creation.
Synopsis
Yochanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.
Synopsis
“Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under license of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce.” —
London Review of Books A powerful story about a family—and a country —in crisis.
The father of three grown children comes back to Israel to get a divorce from his wife of many years; another woman, newly pregnant, awaits him in America. Narrated in turn by each family member—husband and wife, sons and daughter, young grandson—the drama builds to a crescendo at the traditional family gathering on Passover Eve.
“Each character here is brilliantly realized . . . Thank goodness for a novel that is ambitious and humane and that is about things that really matter”—New Statesman
"A master storyteller whose tales reveal the inner life of a vital, conflicted nation.” — Wall Street Journal
Synopsis
“Elusive, haunting.”—
New York Times Book Review A husband’s search for his wife’s lover, lost amid the turbulence of the Yom Kippur War, is the heart of this dreamlike novel. Through five different perspectives, Yehoshua explores the realities and consequences of the affair and the search, laying bare deep-rooted tensions within family, between generations, between Jews and Arabs.
“[A] profound study of personal and political trauma.” —Daily Telegraph
"Has the symmetry of an elegantly cut gem.” —The New Yorker
Synopsis
In the year 999, when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant, takes a second wife, he commits an act whose unforeseen consequences will forever alter his family, his relationships, his business-his life. In an attempt to forestall conflict and advance his business interests at the same time, Ben Attar undertakes his annual journey to Europe with both his first wife and his new wife. The trip is the beginning of a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate with those of our time. Yehoshua renders the medieval world of Jewish and Christian culture and trade with astonishing depth and sensuous detail. Through the trials of a medieval merchant, the renowned author explores the deepest questions about the nature of morality, character, codes of human conduct, and matters of the heart.
Synopsis
“Seductively heady . . . Ingeniously explores the unfathomable mysteries of the heart.” —
Philadelphia Inquirer A young Israeli intern vying for the position of surgeon learns that his internship has been terminated and he has been chosen to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife on a trip to India. There, the couple intend to retrieve their ailing daughter and bring her back to Israel. The long journey awakens urges in the young doctor that will threaten his carefully contained world.
Juxtaposing Western realism and Eastern mysticism, Open Heart is an “astonishing work about love in all its forms. [One that] speaks across the barriers of translation and culture to readers everywhere” (Washington Post Book World).
“At times incantatory and magical, sometimes disturbing, and often astonishing . . . Entertains the mind while it captivates the soul.” —Seattle Times
"Mind-expanding and poetic, a book that will stay with you long after you have turned its final page.” —New York Times
Synopsis
A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakerys owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the womans life take shape—she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful—he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.
Synopsis
In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies and his years of loving attention are ended. But his newfound freedom is filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love. Winter sees him away to the operas of Berlin and a comic tryst with a legal advisor who has a sprained ankle. Spring takes him to Galilee and an underage Indian girl. Jerusalem in the summer presents him with an offer from an old classmate to seduce his infertile wife. And the next autumn it is Nina (if only they spoke the same language!), whose yearning for her Russian home leads Molkho back to life.
Five Seasons is a finely nuanced, unabashedly realistic novel that provides immense reading pleasure.
Synopsis
Mr. Mani is a deeply affecting six-generation family saga, extending from nineteenth century Greece and Poland to British-occupied Palestine to German-occupied Crete and ultimately to modern Israel. The narrative moves through time and is told in five conversations about the Mani family. It ends in Athens in 1848 with Avraham Manis powerful tale about the death of his young son in Jerusalem. A profoundly human novel, rich in drama, irony, and wit.
About the Author
A. B. YEHOSHUA is the author of numerous novels, including Mr. Mani, Five Seasons, The Liberated Bride, and A Woman in Jerusalem. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, and he has received many awards worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. An author, journalist, and internationally reknowned, awarding-winning translator, Hillel Halkin has translated several novels from Hebrew into English.