Customer Reviews

Minotaur

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

 

 

This book starts a little slow but is definitely worth summoning the patience. It is written in a somewhat unconventional fashion. A handfull of characthers are first introduced then each chapter tells that charachter's story. The plots are intrelated and slowly revealed as you make your way through the book. This isn't just used as a clever device but as a way of showing the complexity of each character and makes the book something like both a collection of short stories and a novel. The writing is beautiful even in translation and the depth and complexity of the characters is amazing. It has a sort of classical feel to it but I think more than anything it is the timelessness of the story/stories it tells that gives it this feeling.

This was a book that I found by random selection and fell in love with. It begins with an intriguing concept- that we are each meant to be with one certain person, somewhere in the world- and continues to reveal more and more about the characters and their actions. There is intense character development, but the plot remains focused and clear. It's the kind of story that transcends all cultural boundaries.

It is London, 1963. Today is Alexander Abramov's forty-first birthday. He is an Israeli secret agent. Abramov parks his rented car in a rain-drenched square and takes a bus into town. He is a strange and mysterious man, quite withdrawn. Most important, Alexander has never loved anyone, although he has a wife and children back in Israel, and his parents were kind and caring people.

Two young women board the bus. They sit in front of him and he notices that the girl seated on the left is lovely, with her sleek copper-colored hair, "gathered at the nape of her neck with a black velvet ribbon, tied in a cross-shaped bow." Her eyes are deep brown and her coloring and complexion remind him of his mother's - fair with a pink bloom. As a Mossad agent, Alexander knows how to find the details of her life...and he does so. Her name is Thea and she is seventeen, twenty-four years younger than he. Alexander has devoted his entire life to "tough, disagreeable work, because he needed to love." His work, which is a "series of surmises, assumptions and risks," provides him with the means to distract himself from the emptiness he feels - the sense of otherness he finds within. Perhaps he is the Minotaur within the maze of his long repressed emotions. (Too symbolic for me!). Now he knows, he loves Thea. For the first time in forty-one years, he feels love and need.

Abramov writes to Thea from his hotel room. He tells her that he loves her...that he has loved her all of his life. She doesn't know him but she "will always belong to him." He writes that he has acted as he has throughout his life because he was unaware he had choices. He didn't know he would ever meet her. And now that he has seen her, it is too late. His path is chosen and he cannot deviate from it. "There has been an accident, some sort of discrepancy in birth dates," he sadly explains. Along with his letter, he sends Thea a parcel containing a record, music he knows she likes, and asks her to play it the following Sunday at precisely 1700 hours. He will do the same in his hotel room. The two will be listening to the same music at the same time and this will be their first meeting. He cannot reveal his identity to her, else he blow his cover.

Initially, Alexander does not give Thea an opportunity to write back, nor does he know if she would even consider doing so. But eventually, he gives her a "drop off" place where she can leave her letters should she choose to respond. She does. And oddly, she complies with all Alexander's convoluted instructions without question. Thus begins a correspondence which will last for decades. Thousands of letters are accumulated. Their romance becomes stronger and more obsessive than any real flesh and blood relationship.

The narrative is related from the points of view of three different men, all connected by their love for Thea, who also narrates part of the storyline. Abramov, the spy, plays a central role, with his clandestine relationship with her. His love of music and the Mediterranean culture, flesh out his character. The book's final segment is an account of Abramov's childhood in Palestine - his life in a pre-WWII Jewish settlement.

I was somewhat disappointed by "The Minotaur." The novel does not remind me at all of Graham Greene's or Lawrence Durrell's brilliant writing, as some English critics have suggested. Perhaps it is the translation which makes the prose awkward at times. I also found the initial chapters to be slow, and fairly ridiculous...overly sentimental. I have a good imagination and enjoy fantasy, but just cannot conceive of a girl or woman who would respond with so much enthusiasm to an obvious stalker, and feel no fear or menace. I would be at the police station within minutes of receiving the first letter.

The two other men who become involved with Thea over the years are somewhat interesting, but their characters are not strong enough to sustain the narrative. I wouldn't classify "The Minotaur" as a spy novel. It is too quiet and contemplative. There are no twists and turns, no suspense, and frankly, there is little love in this supposed love story. It is more a novel about obsession. I give it a 3 Star rating because reading this book wasn't a total waste of time and I did enjoy parts of it. Honestly, however, I will not go out of my way to recommend it. There are just too many really good books out there to read....so why waste time on this one?

Author Benjamin Tammuz was born in Soviet Russia. When he was five years old, he immigrated with his parents to Israel, where he contributed to Israeli culture as a novelist, journalist, critic, painter, and sculptor. He was on the editorial board of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Five of his books have been translated into English, including this one.
Jana Perskie

It's a page turner. Bought it a while ago, so don't remember what it was about... but I'm pretty sure it's short stories that are deep and meaningful and just so interesting. I love this writer.

Benjamin Tammuz, Minotaur (1989)

Minotaur is a cerebral love story that both attracts and repels. The central plot is one of an instant, obsessive and life-long love, and this attracts with its romantic obsession. Yet its hero, cold-blooded and calculating even while infatuated, seems to exist without a heart beat.

The novel falls into four sections, each written from the point of view of one of the three principle male characters. Initial obscurity about how each part connects to the others slowly turns into illumination. The narrative moves back and forth, and from side to side, looping and repeating itself, until finally clicking shut on the last page, not, however with a clear resolution, but with a final unanswered question about the heroine, leaving the reader suspended. If this summary sounds abstract, it is meant to be. The narrative legerdemain and structural sophistication are far more interesting than the plot and the characters.

The main character is Alexander Abramov, Israeli land-owner and intelligence agent. He is the one smitten with love for a much younger woman, whom he sees quite by chance one day on a London bus, and with whom he communicates thereafter only by anonymous letters. For the plot to be credible one has to believe that the young woman, Thea, will reciprocate and become almost as obsessed as the man. She does, but even if one does not believe in this eventuality, the idea still serves as a suggestive hypothesis that yields an intriguing, and often violent, tale. There is murder, marital abandonment, the paying off of an unwanted mistress, growing up in Israel between and after the world wars, an attempt by the hero to explain life in terms of an opaque theory of the three circles of music, and the title's hint of labyrinthine maze. If anything unifies these disparate ingredients it is the mind of Abramov, the mind of an intelligence agent. For him, ordinary reality is simply there to be manipulated and coerced, for whom the only escape, the only chance for higher emotional and imaginative fulfillment, is in the world of mental fantasy. Thea is that fantasy.

There is another factor that gives Minotaur it cool surface: it is a translation (from the Hebrew). Like so many translations, the language lacks an idiomatic pulse. It is always clear, but like a piano with a cloth stuffed into its strings, its sound is dampened and muffled. The notes are correct, while the tone is dead. Perhaps this is a virtue in a novel whose skills are so self-consciously detached.