Her Body Knows: Two Novellas [Paperback]

David Grossman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 11, 2006

 

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

 

A fevered storyteller and a captive audience revisit the past in both of David Grossman's novellas, trying to make sense of a betrayal that neither one can put to rest. In Frenzy, a reserved and respectable man draws his sister-in-law into a paranoid conviction---that his wife is having an affair. In the title novella, a successful but embittered novelist delivers a merciless account of her dying mother's love affair with a much younger teenage boy. "Suffused with delirious tension and characters more substantial than in most novels twice its size" (The Village Voice), Her Body Knows is a disquieting journey into the nature of infidelity and desire.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Love has many guises in these two novellas—but it never looks like something you'd aspire to. Israeli writer Grossman is more interested in its perverse forms—jealousy, egocentrism, obsession, voyeurism—but also the ways in which we invent the people we love through fantasy. In "Frenzy," Shaul, a respectable academic, feverishly stalks his wife, Elisheva, convinced she has been having an affair with another man for 10 years. He asks his sister-in-law, Esti, to drive him across the country in the middle of the night in search of Elisheva, and as he describes a decade of watching and waiting and imagining every last detail of Elisheva's betrayal, Esti finds herself getting pulled into Shaul's obsession. In "In Another Life," a writer named Rotem visits her estranged mother, Nili, now dying from cancer. Rotem shares her latest story, a fictional exploration of an episode from her childhood in which her mother is the central character. As Rotem reads aloud, Grossman switches back and forth from Rotem's story to the present moment. The reader sees Nili, and then sees her as Rotem imagines her, while the narrative hovers somewhere between memory and fiction. Grossman (See Under: Love, etc.) can capture surprising psychological depth in a single sentence, and here he opens up whole lives on every page.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Known both for his fiction (The Zigzag Kid, 1997) and his political commentary on the Middle East (Death As a Way of Life, 2003), Israeli author Grossman turns here to two novellas of searing psychological intensity. Both stories deal with the pain of betrayal. In Frenzy, Shaul confides to his sister-in-law that he knows about his wife's 10-year love affair. In wrenching detail, he describes the demise of his marriage and his wife's love for another man. The second novella, In Another Life, portrays a thorny relationship between a dying woman and her emotionally blocked daughter. As her mother lies bloated and ill from chemotherapy, Rotem narrates the brutal story of Nili's visceral sensitivity to everyone but her own daughter. In a stream-of-consciousness style that combines magical realism with highly sensual, often erotic descriptions, Grossman explores the relationship between intuitive and verbal communication and illustrates the emotional morass of love gone awry. Jennifer Baker
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Picador (July 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312425058
• ISBN-13: 978-0312425050
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #863,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and has been translated into thirty languages around the world. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome's Premio per la Pace e l'Azione Umitaria, the Premio Ischia-- International Award for Journalism, Israel's Emet Prize, and the Albatross Prize given by the Günter Grass Foundation.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars it's all in the passion, July 9, 2005

By 

Richard Horn "spike" (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Her Body Knows: Two Novellas (Hardcover)

This is an engaging exploration of passion, the kind that can grab you and not let go. The two novellas each concern forms of passion that many of us would say verge on the pathological. Grossman sucks you in immediately, making the book hard to put down. The relationship between the mother and daughter in the second novella is especially stunning in its depth and depiction.

Although I mostly have high praise, I had some misgivings with this book. First the unfair criticism. David Grossman wrote probably the best book I have ever read ("See Under: Love"), and nothing I've read of his since comes close. Second, both novellas were structured in a way that almost felt manipulative, somewhat like a crime novel (think DaVinci Code) which you read voraciously to find out what happens. The first novella is a journey, a long car ride, and I was anxiously reading to find out what the obsessed and suspicious husband would do when he finally reached his wife and whether any physical intimacy would arise between him and the woman driving him. The second novella also had two such questions, whether the dying mother would make it to the end of the story and whether, decades earlier, she had had a sexual relationship with a teenage boy whom she was instructing in yoga.

Nevertheless, a middle-of-the-road effort by David Grossman may be one of the best fiction books you will read this year, especially if obsessive passion fascinates you.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Women's Literature"? Fiddlesticks!!!, December 10, 2006

By 

Jenni Tsafrir "bibliomanic" (Petah Tikva, Israel) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Her Body Knows: Two Novellas (Paperback)

This book, which drew me in from the start, and I read it slowly (in the original Hebrew), made me realise how ridiculous it is to talk about 'women's literature', as if only women writers can really understand women enough to write about them. David Grossman gets into the depths of the heart and souls of his protagonists almost better than any woman could, in both these novellas and in "Someone to run with" - you can literally feel all that they feel as you read. Magnificent!

5.0 out of 5 stars A must, April 6, 2008

By 

D. Rodrig (Israel) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Her Body Knows: Two Novellas (Paperback)

I just could not let go. I read it in a frenzy to get to the end of the story . He goes far to show the capabilities of the humand mind in the first story,where the husband goes round and round in torment and self torture for ten years. The second story was my favorite ,touching the mother daughter relationship.The parts about Yoga ,giving,working with the body,the character of Nili created by the daughter is a real gem.