Customer Reviews

Rhyming Life and Death

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When the Author, the otherwise unnamed main character of Amos Oz's newest work, arrives as the special guest for a literary evening at a community center in Tel Aviv, he expects the usual sorts of questions from his audience--Why do you write? What role do your books play? How would you define yourself? What his audience never suspects is that the author, while answering their sometimes intrusive questions about himself, is secretly inventing names and imaginary lives for them, connecting them to each other, and even continuing his musings about them well after the meeting is concluded. Approximately thirty-five characters, either in the audience or peripheral to their stories, dominate the Author's interior life, even as the real humans behind these stories are talking with him about his work.

Among these characters is Tsefania Beit-Halachmi (also known as Avraham "Bumek" Schuldenfrei), an (imaginary) elderly poet who is the author of a poetry collection called "Rhyming Life and Death." These poems echo throughout the book--mostly doggerel--as both the narrator/Author and the book's author, Amos Oz, explore serious questions of life and death, and eventually some less serious questions of sex and death.

After the meeting, the Author escorts the unattractive and painfully shy Rochele Reznik home to her apartment, hoping for an evening of passion. His failure leads him to explore the ideas of Arnold Bartok, a part-time philosopher (invented) who has noted that "It is not life and death that came into the world as a pair, but sex and death." Death, Bartok believes, appeared when sexual reproduction was created, and it is sex that has led to aging and death. "We simply have to find a way of eliminating sex," he says, "so as to rid our world of the inevitability of death."

Modernist in approach, Oz plays with the book's form, creating a wide cast of overlapping characters who exemplify his themes, both serious and tongue-in-cheek. The attractive waitress at the café becomes "Ricky," whose boyfriend "Charlie" has also enjoyed the favors of "Lucy," who married the son of Ovadya Hazzam, who won a lottery and is now dying of cancer in a miserable hospital room. Miriam Nehorait, a middle-aged culture lover, may have had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old, hypersensitive young poet in the audience, and they may have been observed by a neighborhood snoop. Other characters are lonely, abandoned, and/or dying.

Though the "novel" blurs the boundaries of reality and imagination and leaves a number of loose ends and undeveloped ideas, Oz provides an unusual and creative meditation on his themes and on the transience of happiness, life, love, and fame. Often darkly humorous and ironic, the author offers few, if any, glimmers of hope for the future. Life is what it is, and though we can escape from reality through dreams and our imaginations, Oz lets us know that sooner or later we must all "turn on the light to clarify what is going on." It is not much to look forward to. "Tomorrow," he tells us, "will be warm and humid, too. And, in fact, tomorrow is today." n Mary Whipple

A Tale of Love and Darkness
Panther in the Basement
My Michael
The Amos Oz Reader

This slim, inventive novel covers an 8-hour period in which a well-known author (referred to, simply, as the Author) participates in a reading from his recently published book. All the while, the Author concocts fictional personalities and stories about the real people he encounters during the course of the evening. Two men in a café, observed as the Author eats a pre-reading omelet, become "a gangster's henchman" and his "agent of sorts, or perhaps a hairdryer salesman." The waitress is cast in a week-long romance with "the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team."

During the reading and afterwards, as the Author walks the city until 4 a.m., his stories spin out into ever greater layers of complexity and interrelatedness, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Through it all, the Author questions why he writes and discovers his art has become his only connection to the world:
"[H]e continues to watch them and write about them so as to touch them without touching, and so that they touch him without really touching him. ... He is covered in shame and confusion because he observes them all from a distance, from the wings, as if they all exist only for him to make use of in his books. And with the shame comes a profound sadness that he is always an outsider, unable to touch or to be touched ...."

Rhyming Life & Death is an interesting conceptual novel. Oz's deconstruction of the creative process is unsettling because it reveals just how quickly we, the readers, will adopt a story line as a kind of "reality," at least with respect to the protagonist. While this book's cerebral pleasures are many, its emotional resonance falls flat. It's difficult to care much about the Author's roughly-drawn characters and sketchy stories, making Rhyming Life & Death more of an engaging philosophical exercise than a novel.

In the hands of a less skilled writer, or a skilled writer who is lazy and at the very end of his of her career, a novel like Rhyming Life and Death could devolve into shallow cliché and short hand for more profound ideas and subject matter. But Amos Oz takes this small book, with its post modern type character "The Author" and creates a story that is deeply moving and human. Although using some stock post-modern tricks, Oz never allows the literary devices to do the work for him. He is always conscious that the created work should do its own labor, and not the trick. So this short novel, while feeling very late (in the way Philip Roth's last four books have felt late) is anything but underdeveloped (as Roth's last four books have been underdeveloped); Amos Oz is still capable of producing works of fiction which stand on their own merits. One should read Rhyming in Life and Death no matter who wrote the work.

A somewhat surreal journey into one man's imagination with shifting points of view, poetic interjections and playful alternate outcomes. Since the plot's relation to reality is tenuous I couldn't really get my hands around it.

In style and subject this kind-of novel follows several modern writers, most noteably J.M. Coetzee, Garrison Keillor (meet Dr. Freud), and the darker side of I.B. Singer and S.Y. Agnon (as a young man our author met with Agnon). Also, Maupassant offers a similar story, "Un humble drame," in which a pretty stranger, glimpsed during an overnight coach journey, excites the author's creative urges and allows for a dramatization of the creative process.

Oz offers here another contemporary depiction of the creative, erotic process (with a naturalistic seduction scene a la Musil), smoothly and vividly narrated (that's Oz's smarm,and Coetzee's), all abetted by a superb translation. Recommended for a quick read. The author portrays in vivid fantasy several stock(?)Israeli types who would just as easily be at home in NYC or Moscow.

This novella has an interesting premise. It is an account of an evening in the life of an author, but during this evening he is imagining the lives of people he meets or simply observes. As he thinks about these lives, he amends his descriptions, just as an author might rewrite his work, but at the same time the author is thinking about his actual encounters, particularly with a lonely, shy woman. The encounter with this woman is bleaker than it needs to be, because of the personality of the fictional author. In general, I got the sense that Oz didn't invest too much time and effort into this work.

And clearly what Amos Oz was after here was less a novel than his description of what is a novel, how characters find their shapes, when an author is off stage and when he's on (lying, I loved that) and this is just in a way a primer answering the questions that readers ask of famous authors. It's show not tell but essentially Oz is telling us what it is like to be a famous writer and how that writer observes, imagines and how what he speaks is detached and untrue at times but that what he sees gets transformed by imagination. Generous of Oz to answer the usual questions put to him and others in midlife who achieve fame for writing imaginary things. He's showing as said but he's also telling in his own novelistic way.

Rhyming Life & Death by Amos Oz is a stylishly packaged and on the outside, appears to be a hip and clever little book that unfortunately, I was unable to read. The novel starts out at a brisk walk toward the park and then somehow gets itself tangled up in the low branches of a tree and the reader never makes it out. I don't think I've ever come upon a book of pages with so many question marks thrown at the reader, almost like stars on a dark night all falling to the ground; there simply are too many to catch. And while I have respect for Amos Oz as I have read his other well written and interesting essays and stories in other journals; for readability, I simply had to give this one a pass, as in, I'd rather not. The title, though is breathtaking, and the voice of the narrator is engaging, at first the questions are interesting and mimic the ticker tape residing in all writers; there is a promising premise here; however, while waiting to speak in front of the audience, though the music of the inner and outer dialogue is somewhat engaging, the novel just never works up the writers appetite for finding the answers to the questions; less questions, more answers. There is a modern voice here that could have risen higher than the white noise inside the head; I wish the writer had maybe taken more time with unfolding of the characters stories, or rather, more detail and smoothness so as to engage the reader, not dissuade the reader.