Customer Reviews

Love Life

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

 

 

I devoured Love Life. Never have I read a more honest, disturbing, and brilliant account of the way uncertainty in love and life can translate into obsession and erotic fury. I recommend this book to anyone who is not afraid to take a magnifying glass to the darkest corners of the self. The truth is, Shalev's seemingly bottomless reservoir of fresh, gorgeous imagery and her nearly flawless command of language make even that view beautiful. I can't imagine that anyone who reads this book will be left unaffected; when i finished it I felt eviscerated. But pleasantly so.

A wonderful book, compelling to read. I read it non-stop for three days and felt that I was flung into the haphazard world of the main character, Ya'ara. The writing is supurb. Descriptive, intimate and sometimes painfully easy to identify with. The situation is human and the characters are simple people who have all the complexities of those we know and love in our own lives. Bravo to Shalev! A must!

One of the most absorbing and alluring books I have read in a long time. This is an incredibly psychologically astute writer. She tells a wonderfully evocative and erotic tale of the power of desire for the unattainable and the unknown.

I loved this book. it may be different, and it's either you LOVE it or you dont like at at all. at first you dont understand what is going on in Yaara's mind, falling in love in such an obssesive way with her father's friend, an older and not so attractive man who doesnt treat her the way you would like to be treated. but as you keep on reading you start understanding Yaara's inner complicated world, and many things are starting to make sense. I also love Zeruya Shalev's way of writing. it's almost poetic,and the character seems to be driffting from one episode to the other...very much worth reading.

I read this book several years ago, and it is still one of my favorites. It is definitely not for the weak of heart or those obsessed with morality.
First, the punctuation in this book will aggravate most gentle readers who are looking for an easy read. It reads in "thoughts" and rarely has a period. I would consider it a whirlwind book, and those adept to reading critically will have trouble putting it down, for want of the next sentence.
Secondly, if you consider yourself a person who cast judgment easily, this book is NOT for you. The subject and common thread of this book is adultery and disappointments.
If you still desire to read this book, you will NOT be disappointed. You can feel the main characters confusion and disillusion with her life. Shalev has a way of describing things poetically and has an interesting perspective on things that I loved and had never thought of before.
She has her character try on a dress just to see a mannequin naked and as defiled as she feels inside.
Shalev never gives pretense that her main character needs "therapy" or should not feel the way she is feeling, but she takes the reader through the feelings so palatably that you almost feel it yourself.
I read this book in 2 days without being able to put it down.
I would recommend it to any reader who reads avidly, is savvy to literature, and can read critically without passing judgment on the heroine.

In Love Life, Shalev packs a lot of contradictory impulses into one intense novel. The narrator has the firm desire to be loved, but she constantly works to undermine those who love her. She seeks self-knowledge, but takes actions which only cloud her awareness of herself. She strives to succeed as a scholar, only to watch herself stumble and fall in writing her thesis. And what is the secret behind her multifarious failures? A father fixation. Ya'arah is guided by an impulse as old as the human species. But this does not make Love Life pat or cliché. Quite the contrary, this dense book is filled with interesting observations about life, love, death, and our attempts to cope with loss and change.

I am not sure I should have read this book. Unlike some other readers did not find it poorly written. In opposite I found it written with a great deal of insight, intelligence and imagination. The story of the young Yaara's obsessive love for an older man , her shameless pursuit of him is gripping. I did however find in some deep way offensive. This has to do with the amoral approach of the heroine to all other characters, beginning with the husband she abandons. It has to do also with her quite indifferent response to the lover's treating her as if she were a prostitute to be used not only by him but by his friend. It has to with a kind of hungry amorality which informs the tone and spirit of the work.
Again the narrator and main character have intelligence, perceptiveness, an interesting way of seeing things. But the amorality which pervades the whole story seems to me a fundamental and inexcusable failing.And this despite the fact that the characters have a believability about them, and make a strong impression on the reader.

I started reading "Love Life" because it is being made into a movie by Maria Schrader, the famous German actress (who is also infamously philosemitic). So, I wanted to see what the big deal was. Also, a friend had highly recommended the book to me.

I was deeply disappointed.

The basic plot is intriguing, but I found Shalev's prose to be almost unreadable. Nearly the entire novel is told in stream-of-consciousness style. Most sentences are extended narrations with unusual punctuation, combining numerous ideas. Here is a real example:
"Your father's sure he was there on some sort of security job, living on his rich wife's money, a guttersnipe who married money and now he's come back to show off the airs and graces he picked up in Europe, and I saw that her eyes were fixed on the mirror on the opposite wall, watching the words coming out of her mouth, dirty, venomous, and again I thought, who knows what she's capable of saying about me, and I felt suffocated next to her and I said, I have to go, and she exclaimed, not yet, trying to keep me with her like she tried to keep him, stay with me until he goes, and I asked, why, and she shrugged her shoulders in a childish gesture, I don't know."

That may not seem seem bad, but nearly every sentence in the novel is like that. 290 pages of it. Ultimately, the writing style distracts from the plot, which is never a good thing for a novel.

i quite enjoyed reading this book, unlike the reader from California, i thought the character, yaara, experienced passion at its fullest,ugliest most sordid form!! i dont see her as a female stalker, but as someone who is on the road to self discovery and unknowingly utilizes this relationship as a means of understanding herself. although the author doesnt dwelve into her past one can sense that yaara has finally been awakened to life!

I was not as enamored of Love Life as the other reviewers. I was disappointed that it never occurred to the main character Yaara that she really needed psychiatric or psychological counseling to deal with her obsessions. There was no way the object of her love would ever fall in love with her, the way she pursued him like a stalker, without ever receiving any positive feedback from him. I never understood her attraction to him to begin with, I found him gross and disgusting from the very beginning, and she only realized at the end that he was also a violent cheating liar. The reader could have told her that long before. She apparently only liked him for his dark skin. She is an Ashkenazi Jew who has an attraction to the Eastern Jews, but she also seriously needed professional help.

Yaara views herself as a victim even though the consequences she suffered were due to the choices she made. She never seems to feel any shame or regret for the way she treated her husband. She is aware of the fact that he may not take her back after she abandoned him, but she does not feel sorry or remorseful, she only feels sorry for herself, she only sees things in terms of how they affect her. She is extremely self-centered and egotistical. At the end of the novel she has the nerve to compare herself to the woman in the Temple legend who was abandoned by both her husband and her lover. The only thing she had in common with the woman in the legend was that they were both a prisoner for three days. But Yaara left her husband, he did not leave her or abandon her, and she abused him when they lived together anyway, attacking him for little things. The woman in the legend may be a victim but Yaara is not. Yaara takes responsibility for her predicament to some degree, but she sees herself as being abandoned by both men in her life when that is not what happened, she left both of them.

In the middle of the book Yaara remembers shoplifting as a girl and bringing the booty to her mother to comfort her in her grief over losing a baby. The fact that the mother does not condemn her daughter for stealing is a clue as to why Yaara grew up to be a person without a conscience. Yaara’s mother read Bible stories to her when she was younger, and so both were very familiar with the Old Testament, but they apparently skipped over the Ten Commandments, where it says thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not lie. Yaara's character lied repeatedly throughout the book, and then she was angry when her lover lied to her. I am disappointed that people so familiar with the Bible ignored its moral lessons, and failed to transmit them to their children, and just took from the Bible what they wanted to use to rationalize their selfish behavior.