A Woman in Jerusalem: A Novel by A. B. Yehoshua Reviewed by Ruth Franklin
The New Republic Online
"According to the Jewish calendar, the day begins at sundown. This runs counter to the way most people experience time, but it makes a peculiar sense in the novels of A.B. Yehoshua, in which the most important activities almost always take place at night, and the main characters are insomniacs, either by choice or by compulsion. In The Lover, Yehoshua's first novel, published almost thirty years ago, the owner of an auto repair shop takes to driving around in a tow truck during the early morning hours in search of a man who has mysteriously disappeared. More recently, The Liberated Bride ? a glorious romp of a novel that bursts with genres (family romance, campus satire, epistolary novel, folk tale) and personalities ? features an extended sequence in which an Israeli professor of Arab studies, accompanied by an Israeli Arab driver, attends a midnight mass at a Christian monastery to hear the rhapsodic singing of a Lebanese nun who is said to faint at the height of her religious ecstasy...." Read the entire New Republic Online review.