Customer Reviews

The Liberated Bride

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's rather hard to describe this enormous book in one short review. It's not a book really, but rather a chunk of life that sits quivering on your bookshelf. Other readers have summarized the plot well enough - it's a book about relationships, both political and personal - husband and wife, father and son, Israeli and Arab. I won't repeat.

What sets this book apart from other books is it's slow pace and masterful attention to detail. It draws you in, without your realizing it. By revealing so many aspects of the characters' lives and relationships, it gradually builds a complete and entire picture of the characters' world, until you feel as though it's your world too. Nothing is particularly suspenseful - you just feel as though you're living the main character's life, day by day, and discovering the world from a new perspective. At age seventeen, I am proud to state that I have served as a judge, studied Algeria's war-torn history, been through a broken marriage, and visited the West Bank with my personal driver. I cried and laughed with Ofer, felt Rivlin's anxiety and curiousity and excitement. A book that causes a female high school student to identify with a meddlesome old orientalist has to be something special.

I visited Jerusalem a few weeks after I read the book, and I was completely excited when we ate at a Humus place in Abu Gush, and when we passed through the Talpiyyot Neighborhood and saw the signs pointing to Shai Agnon's house, as if I was revisiting places that I knew well.

In that sense, this is a good read for anyone who wants to get a feel of Israel. However, the book was written before the recent intifada, and Israeli/Arab-Palestinian relationships in the book are FAR more easygoing and friendly than they are now. I cried when I read the beautiful chapters describing Rivlin's visits to Ramallah, because there was once a time when Palestinians and Israelis could listen together to poetry about love. Not anymore! I can't even tell you whether the characterization of Arabs in the book is accurate or not, because I met more Arabs while reading than I ever have in real life!

To all the readers who are wondering about the awkward prose - it must be the result of translation. I read the book in it's original language, and the writing flows completely naturally. Nothing sounds contrived. However it is impossible to translate the author's toying with titles and tenses into English, because of differences in Hebrew and English grammatical structure which I am sure no one wants to hear about!

Anyway, I highly recommend this book to everyone. Read it in Hebrew if you can, but if not, the story is worth struggling through the most mediocre of translations. It will give you a personal insight into lives that could easily have been real, as well as teaching you more than you ever wanted to know about some aspects of Israeli society.

The insight into the human condition, the overall writing style, and the incredible characters make this one of the best reads I've come across in a long time. Yehoshua is remarkable in the way he blends atmosphere, plot, and people into this revealing tale. I highly recommend this book!!!

Also recommended: McCrae's Bark of the Dogwood and House of Sand and Fog

This much-anticipated novel by the prominent Israeli writer confirms his stature as one of today's greatest living authors. At once meticulously authentic and lyrically imaginative, the book follows the Orientalist Y. Rivlin in his insistent, even obsessive, quest for truth - both in his personal life and in the current and historical dynamics of conflict and politics in the Middle East. At its core is the ever-present exploration of identity - fluid, interdependent and ultimately undefinable. In beautiful passages translating Arabic love poetry from the middle ages, there is also a subtle hint of surrender for Rivlin - a grudging acknowledgment of failure to rationally understand his "subjects", leaving no option but a renewed immersion in the profound soulfulness and humanity of their lyrics.
Yehoshua is a master at combining detailed descriptions of everyday life with an ambitiously wide scope, creating for the reader the illusion of a mere plot-driven human story while actually presenting a masterpiece dripping with substance from its myriad artfully-designed folds, layers, nooks and crannies. A masterful achievement and a pleasure to read and re-read.

the existential struggles both within the Israeli Jewish community-their families, associations, and the Palestinians are exquisitely examined in the context of personal angst,historic,and religious realities. Being extremely involved with the current situation,this book is a beautiful companion in a way that the NEW YORK TIMES will never be. The translation by Hillel Halkin is poetic and careful in the best senses of these words-a treat

This was my first experience with Yehoshua and I am permanently hooked. This complex, intensely human and beautifully translated story provides the reader with insights into the complicated and overlapping relationships that Palestinians and Israelis share and live out daily in Israel and the West Bank. The wide range of characters in the book is both typical and radically atypical in that Yeshoshua's people are dealing with normal family and day-to-day issues, but most of them are far from average in their professions, interests and awareness of the dangerous context that they live in. There's no way to adequately address the story line of this novel, other than to say that it just grabs you and pulls you in from the get-go. The characters are beautifully sketched, unfathomable at times, neurotic, loving and always interesting. The reader winds up caring deeply about them all. The only thing disappointing about the book was that it eventually ended.
One final comment. I read this book for the Middle East Book Club that I have belonged to for some years. We rarely read fiction for this group, but this novel provided fodder for the best discussion we've had about the region for a long time. We are still arguing about the meaning of the title.

Yehoshua has a deep understanding of what makes his main character, Rivlin, tick. The guy is rather an emotional mess, but a close observer of the other characters who are less clearly drawn. His wife is highly predictible and says the same things each time she appears. The Arabs are interesting, but stereotypical.

The plot is creaky and the chapter in which the complex sitation between Rivlin's son and the son's ex-wife is finally explained, seems completely contrived. Rather than offering a satisfying conclusion to the book's plot, it feels tacked on, an easy way out for the author who's dug himself a hole. Also, I had guessed the "secret" hundreds of pages earlier. Maybe I was supposed to, but Rivlin never did.

The ending, too, is contrived in that everything seems to have worked out for the best.

I like Yehoshua's writing, but there is something heavy about it. The book is long and I struggled to stick with it, not because I was bored, but because the people in it were so anxious that they made me anxious, too. The details about life in Israel, for Jew and Arab, were fascinating. I am assuming they are close to reality.

But for readers new to Yehoshua, I recommend Mr. Mani.

Professor Yochanan Rivlin has hated weddings ever since his son's marriage failed five years earlier. As Israeli author Yehoshua's novel opens, Rivlin fidgets in the background of his Arab student's wedding, miserable, and impatient to be home.

"His wife, Hagit, who knew all too well how weddings had depressed him in recent years, had warned against it. `Why do you need the aggravation?' she had asked. `But they're Arabs,' he'd answered mildly, with the innocence of a man pursuing an academic interest. `As opposed to what?' she had wanted to know. `Human beings?' `On the contrary...on the contrary...' he had tried defending himself, at a loss to explain how Arabs, although not among the many objects of his envy, could be more human than anyone else."

In this rather melancholy and enigmatic comedy of manners, Yehoshua explores the intimacy of hatred and interdependence and ordinary decency in the Palestinian/Israeli situation. Rivlin is a professor of Arab Studies at Haifa University, unable to finish a book exploring the Algerian independence fight because of his incomprehension of the 1990s carnage there. His department head speaks fluent Arabic and publicly despairs of the Arabs ever understanding the concept of freedom. His ambitious and newly married student, Samaher, has failed to finish a paper for her degree and as the novel proceeds, the reasons are increasingly mysterious.

But it's the mystery of his son, Ofer's, divorce that obsesses Rivlin. It's an unsettled time for him - a new apartment; his wife, a judge, preoccupied with an important, secret case; his book in the doldrums. The death of his son's former father-in-law provides just the excuse he needs to go sniffing around his former in-laws, prodding Galya, the remarried daughter-in-law, for answers, which he does not get.

During the course of the story, Rivlin finds himself giving in to uncharacteristic impulse - a tense, heady night accompanying an Arab Israeli to visit his homesick sister in Galilee, unable to return to her home in Israel because of her marriage to a Palestinian, attending a concert at a Palestinian Christian Church, spending the night there waiting to pick up Arab workers at dawn, and repeated visits to the in-laws, cajoling secrets out of his their trusted Arab retainer.

Yehoshua's characters are educated people and very civilized toward each other in Haifa, Israel's most peacefully integrated city. But underneath the Arab hospitality simmers a resentment which bubbles easily to the surface, while the Jews cannot help a certain condescension that goes with their unstable, but dominant position. A powerful, affecting novel, occasionally confusing to American readers, but more often illuminating.

It's a simple book, beautifully written. I have a bad habit of starting to read something and losing interest. I sailed through The Liberated Bride. There's something about the main character's observations and experiences that is so familiar, so relatable. Highly recommended.

I was taken by this novel from the first page. Set in 1990s Israel, the author follows a year in the life of a university professor from Haifa, an Orientalist of the old school and senior member of his department, untouched by post-colonial theory and Edward Said. Old fashioned and out of touch in other ways, he is still endearingly and sympathetically drawn, while he attempts ineffectually to unravel the mystery around the sudden end of his son's marriage to a young woman whose parents run a hotel in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the scope of the novel expands in what seems like all directions, embracing the lives of many characters, including his department colleagues and their spouses, his in-laws, his son and his son's ex-wife and her family, another son who is an officer in the Army, a hotel maitre d', one of his students and her family, a minibus driver, the widow of a man killed by a terrorist bomb, an old woman who lives across the street - most of all his long-suffering wife, who is a judge in a court of law - all in all, a cast of characters that includes Christians and Muslims, as well as Jews.

There is some melodrama in the story, some comedy, and a fair amount of irony, as day-to-day events unfold, with time out for stage performances, observances of Ramadan, a Palestinian wedding, translations of folk tales for the professor's research on the origins of extremist fundamentalism in Algeria, and a late-night singing recital by a feinting nun. The irony deepens as we (but not the professor) learn what precipitated the young couple's divorce, through an exchange of letters, the most revealing of which is never delivered. Meanwhile, the weather goes through a complete cycle of seasons, and we travel back and forth between Haifa and Jerusalem, more than once into the West Bank, and five times to the airport to meet or send off visitors. The liberated bride of the title? Well, it could be nearly any female in the story, for they are all single-minded and more or less successful at keeping the men in their lives in hand. Yehoshua's novel is a long, enjoyable read, and I recommend it highly.

To read Yehoshua is to go on an unknown, but fullfilling trip. This book wanders to many places and has many themes, but it ultimately gives the reader the sense that this was a journey worth taking.The characters are so well defined that there is no mystery in what they want.They do not always succeed in their endevours, but the reader is filled in to the mystery that the characters do not always solve. This was a terrific read. Next to The Lover, my favorite of his books