Customer Reviews

A Pigeon and a Boy: A Novel

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4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

WHAT CHAGALL IS TO PAINT, SHALEV IS TO WORDS

The feeling I had when reading a Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev that I had entered the world of a Chagall painting. In fact, what Chagall is to paint, Shalev is to words.

First they both create intense, detail-packed scenes.
Marc Chagall wastes no space as every square inch of his canvas is filled with vibrant and powerful colors and detail. A Marc Chagall painting is a feast for the eyes. These details makes the extraordinary events more plausible. Shalev's rich sensory details allow the reader not only to see, but to touch, taste and hear and fully enter the scene. The story of one of the main characters, The Baby, starts:
That day began as many other's in the baby's life, with his eyes opening as always before those of the other children. With his skin feeling the coolness and warmth of the air....With his ears listening to the male pigeons squabbling on the roof, their nails scraping the drainpipes, the hands of the woman in charge of the kibbutz children's house toiling in the small kitchen. With his nose smelling that the porridge is already cooking there, the margarine softening, the jam reddening in little dishes."

For Shalev memory is a close up lens of details: the young woman who's knees never stopped jiggling, the taste of pickles, his mother's wide brimmed yellow hat, the doctor dipping cookie after cookie into lemon and tea, his brother skipping from rock to rock while he plodded along, the smell of hot dust, the blue handkerchief that is used for tears of joy and loss. Shalev writes:
There are some people whose sensory organs capture reality for them. But with me, my sensory organs mediate between reality and memory, and not every organ in its realm. Sometimes my nose connects sound to image, sometimes my ear feels, my eye recalls aromas, my fingers see.

Chagall, like Shalev, loves the Bible and it forms the undercurrent or backdrop of their work. The subject matter of many of Chagall's most well known works such as Rachel Hides Her Father's Household Gods and Solitude are the familiar tales from the Old Testament.
Even Chagall's work which is not about a biblical theme has icons of Judaism: A chuppah (marriage canopy), a talis (prayer shall), a torah.

In A Pigeon and a Boy, the narrator, a tour guide, takes us through Israel, before it became a state and after, and that tour includes over three thousand years of historical reference. In one site, Moses is on Mount Nebo in another the The Boy dispatches a dove like Noah in the ark, in yet another, points out where Samuel and Samson once had stood. More than the direct mention of biblical places and persons is the echoing of the language of the Bible. When a building contractor points and pronounces: "Let there be a wall" and "Let there be a window" and ..."Let there be a deck," we hear the Genesis creation story. The Boy, like the first man, Adam, "...did not walk ahead of not behind the girl. He walked abreast of her." Even in the handling of pigeons we hear the Jewish liturgy of Yom Kippur. Instead of "who shall live and who shall die," Shalev tells of Miriam, the pigeon trainer, who painstakingly records in her book (not the book of life),"...which pigeons and landed first and which last, which had managed to pass easily through the bars or the trap door and which had not."

Both artists, painter and writer incorporate the realistic side by side with the fantastic. Animals and humans have special powers of levitation, flight, telepathy, and telekinesis. Chagall's lovers take flight in a brilliantly blue sky, above the Eiffel Tower and the rooftops of Paris Houses. The everyday becomes magical.

In A Pigeon and a Boy, there is the scene when a wealthy businessman enters a street in pre-1948 Tel Aviv driving a large American Ford Thunderbird. "Suddenly a hush fell on the street. Boys lifted their heads from games of marbles. Girls skipping rope froze in mid-twirl. Men fell silent, licking their lips. Women became Lot's wife, pillars of salt." In this world where reality is shaped by special powers, birds can deliver love and comfort and even death can be challenged and to some measure beaten.




In a dreamlike atmosphere Chagall and Shalev share many of the same images. For Chagall, it was nostalgia for the village he left behind in Russia. This village appears and reappears in numerous pieces. For Shalev, it is one woman's nostalgia for her home in Tel Aviv, a man's overwhelming desire to have as house of his own, and a people's unwavering longing for their homeland. Other common images are birds, which abound in Chagall's work and which are central of the story of Shalev's tale.

In addition to shared techniques and symbols, Chagall and Shalev both believe in the power of love to transcend and heal. Chagall's lovers are elevated above the world. They float, they fly, they spring upside down and do head stands. Nothing holds down love, not even gravity.

A Pigeon and A Boy is the story of love conquering even death and of love healing a broken soul. In the midst of a battle, the pigeon flies to carry its message of life, and the war falls silent.
"The pigeon ascended rapidly. Above the flames, above the smoke, above the gunshots, above the shouts, to the sky blue, the silence. Homeward. To Her." And a man whose confidence and soul had been crushed, is restored by his love of a woman and a house and their love of him. "I built and was built, I loved and was loved, my soul grew a new skin, a roof, a floor, a wall."

The magic and sensory details, the dreams and hope in A Pigeon and A Boy, like the work of Chagall, leave us richer for the experience.

This is the kind of book you want to read slowly, to savour every word, and long for it not to finish. Meir Shalev's beautifully crafted book, with its flowing, evocative language, masterfully translated by Evan Fallenberg, consists of two ingeniously interwoven tales of people a generation apart, linked by places and events. One is a first person narrative of an adult tour-guide yearning for affection and a place he can consider 'home', and the other a touching story of the love between two teenagers, whose main channel of communication is through the homing-pigeons they send back and forth for the Hagana, the underground movement struggling against British rule in pre-State Israel. Through the intertwined tales, artfully tied up in the final denouement, the reader subtly gains insight into the handling of homing-pigeons and the tense days leading up to the War of Independence. The slight suspension of credibility called for here and there in the book only serve to enrich the sensitive flow of a wonderful story. Not to be missed!

A masterpiece of two woven stories, the love story between two pigeon handlers in the period prior to Israel's War of Independence framed and intersected by that of a tour guide specializing in bird watching who learns the details of the tale from one of his guests.

In this unlikely subject, the reader is treated to learning the habits and handling of homing pigeons that served as reliable means of communication during the British Mandate of the land of Israel until 1948.

It is hard to do this story justice with a synopsis or a review. The power of the novel is in the crafting of the tale as it unfolds, with the main characters--although beautifully detailed--remaining nameless but for their functions as pigeon handlers. Not so the tour guide, whose life is unraveling before it is put together again with a new love.

A great book selection for a book group, as it covers several interesting issues to discuss.

Talia Carner, author,
Puppet Child and China Doll

All novels about Israel fascinate me. This one intrigued me because of the rhythm of each sentence, and therefore, kudos to the translator. The parallel stories intertwine and the narrative is not lost because of it, as in so many other novels using flashback technique. The ending was so poetic, so indicative of the lengths to which one must go to survive in a land that has a precarious topography, the joy of discovering love and unexpected friendship, the land of women alongside the men/boys they admire, the willingness to share and provide support - these stimulated my mind. Every character stood out for me, and I would love to divulge the ending, but that would spoil it for a reader. This book has a mystique that resonates. Hardship and love, and not a 'pat' love story at all - uniquely told, immersing the reader in every page, and lingering afterward.
I suppose you'd say I enjoyed this tale, where the battle is the background, the war between palestine and israel is not the centerpoint, and the reader is not embroiled in the brutality. It is the people who leap from the page.
I am reminded of Masha Hamilton's novels about the Middle East and her ability to evoke the essence of the land and the people, wshether Israeli or Arab.
A Pigeon and a Boy: A Novel

At the center of this Israeli novel partially set in 1948 and partially in the present is an amazingly tender love story between two lovers of pigeons. It is told with wonderful sensitivity and adroitly captures the beauty and fragility of first love.

That is the strong point of this book by the talented Meir Shalev. The Israeli army really did use pigeons to send messages during its desperate struggle for independence (I once met a pigeon handler from the war myself). This book will teach you more than you thought possible about the breeding, training and maintenance of carrier pigeons. It also occurred to me that the pigeon, which only knows and desires one thing, namely to return to its home, is a metaphor for the wounded Jewish people struggling to recover after the Holocaust by returning to its ancient homeland.

Unfortunately there is a parallel story that also forms a major part of the book, featuring a wimpy tour guide called Yair trapped in a bad marriage to the lovely but cold American immigrant Liora. (Is this too metaphorical?) We guess long before the author tells us what the connection is between the two stories. It's unclear if he wanted this to be a mystery since he's dropping hints about it from page one.

Yair is conducting his own love affair with Tirza, his childhood sweetheart, who has now become a building contractor and its renovating an ancient but delapidated house that Yair has found in the countryside. Again, the metaphor seems apt. Unfortunately, neither Yair nor Tirza command our affection and their love affair seems pallid and forced compared to the parallel romance between the two pigeon handlers.

I should add that the translation of this book to English has many infelicitous moments. Tirza is referred to as "lovey" which is a very strange rendering from the original Hebrew and there are many other moments in the book when the English sounds more than a little off.

This book is worth reading for the interesting history and the lovely adolescent love affair -- but it's weakened by some of the other baggage it carries around with it.

When I first spotted the book on the shelves at one of the local bookstores, I stared at it for 2-minutes. It wasn't the glossy jacket that stood out, nor was it a particularly catchy title that made me want to buy the book. It was the author's name: Meir Shalev.

An Israeli author's book being sold here? I could tell the author is an Israeli from the name. I picked the book out of curiosity and treated it as a window into a forbidden culture.

I gave the book 5 stars not because I think it is extraordinarily imaginative or extremely engaging, but simply because I found it very human. It is certainly original. I could easily describe Shalev as the Amin Maalouf of Israel, but I wish to remain politically correct.

The story is set at modern day Israel, but stretches back to a time shortly before the Nakbah (or what is referred to by the author as Israel's War of Independence). Yair is an out-of-place, ugly-duckling-member of his family that consists of a biological mother; an adoptive father; and an unscrupulous younger half-brother, who is everything Yair isn't.

Yair's almost miraculous birth, and the story revolving around it, as well as the relationship he had with his mother and her influence on him - is what the story is mainly about. What the story tells us, metaphorically, is that carrier pigeons deliver much more than coded messages in tiny capsules. They carry hope; love; perseverence; dedication and a lot more. The messages they deliver are sagas of all kinds. Pigeons are the hidden warriors; the love messengers; and the deliverers of the gift of life - a life like that of Yair's.

I was delighted to have discovered this Israeli author. It felt like humanity triumphed over imposed cultural censorship and isolation. We may very well be political enemies (or made to feel as such), but the culture of arts and narratives transcends geographical borders and checkpoints. Something for our cultures to celebrate.

This 2007 Israeli novel won several literary prizes and I can well understand why. It is a love story on many levels - the love between a man and a woman, the love of a country, and a love of the desire for a home. It is also the story of homing pigeons and I learned more than I ever thought I would know about their use throughout history as well as their care and feeding and importance to the Israelis during their 1948 war.

There are two interweaving stories here, one taking place in the present and told in the first person by an Israeli tour guide who meets up with an American who had once fought in the long-ago war and remembers a pigeon handler who was killed at the time. This stirs the Israeli guide's memories and slowly but surely he weaves in the story of "Baby" a young man from a Kibbutz who handled pigeons and the girl who loved him. But this was a long time ago, and the tour guide is currently dealing with an unhappy marriage, the death of his mother and a longing for a home of is own. I was completely entranced by the story he tells and the way it is told. It is his own personal story of course, but it is also the story of Israel itself and, for the first time in my life, I got a real sense of what it must be like to be an Israeli.

The book is only 311 pages long and I read it quite quickly, reading it in all my spare moments and thinking about it in between. The writing is simple and yet it invokes a mood that just pulled me into the time and the place of modern Israel as well as the Israel of 60 years ago. The pace moves more quickly as the book moves along, and as the story unfolds, more and more becomes clear and I was aware throughout that I was in the presence of a fine writer.

This book was wonderful! Mr. Shalev has refined the art of excellent character development, with characters who inspire real empathy. You laugh when they laugh, cry when they cry, and grieve when they do too. Even the descriptions of the cars and travel routes was so good it placed you right in the passenger seat (or the roof rack of "Behemoth", as the case may be!) It is a gripping tale about life in the emerging state of Israel spanning two generations, complex family connections, joy, disappointment, tragedy and loss, leaving us with the always-present knowledge and hope that life goes on from generation to generation as we continue our ancestors' stories, which remains always part of us.

Like Amos Oz's book, "A Tale of Love and Darkness", (which I also highly recommend), this book leaves you knowing much more about people, even yourself, and about life in Israel before and after 1948.

It's a keeper, to read and reread as time goes by. I loved it!

A friend from Israel notified me that this book had just been translated from the Hebrew, a friend I trust with literary choices. I will forever be in her debt. This is a moving story, actually two stories. The boy with the pigeon, known as Baby is introduced to the training and "dispatching" of homing pigeons by the Palmach during Israels' fight for independence. The love the boy has for the pigeons is eventually secondary to the love for a girl, another handler of homing pigeons. The story is narrated by Yair, a tour guide whose own story of love and growth is yet one more wonderful thing to read. Every character in this book is drawn with love and attention to the smallest virtue and flaw. Shalev's prose is what I always hoped to find in poetry. His use of personification of houses makes them come alive as Yair builds a house of his own from which he becomes a mensch.
Yair's mother sums up what is important when she says,"What does a person need?...not much: something sweet to eat, and a story to tell, and time and space, and gladioluses in a vase, and two friends, and two hillttops, one on which to stand and the other upon which to gaze. And two eyes for watching the heavens and waiting." This is "a story to tell" and beautifully done it is.

This is one of the best books I have recently read . It is poetry in prose. The wealth of the language and the elegance of style are well reflected in this superb translation. The hardship of the period and the continuation of the life cycle are presented almost like in a thriller. Meir Shalev shows how thorough he is in his research by sharing with us all the details relating to the period and to the tools used for communicating. It is a pure and idealistic love story that reflects the pure and idealistic love of the pioneers for the land of Israel.
It is literature at its best!