Customer Reviews

The Story Begins: Essays on Literature

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In this small book the Israeli writer Amos Oz analyzes story- beginnings . The writers of the stories are Fontane, Agnon, Chekhov, Yaacov Shabtai,Dostoevsky, Raymond Carver, among others.

He introduces the volume by describing the difference between a storyteller- novelist , writer of fiction works, and the way a scholarly researcher works. His father who was a scholar had a desk piled with books, and at every stage of the writing process backed it up with citations and support. Oz talks about facing the blank page, and the special freedom it gives. He also talks about its special burden. He speaks also about how the writer's aim must be to draw the reader inside the story, so that the reader in effect is also writing the story when reading it.

Oz is a master and his thoughts on these stories are insightful. It is interesting that each of the chapters comes from a lesson or lecture, some of which he gave at the Kibbutz Brenner high school, and others at Haifa University.

Oz's most recent work is a series of essays on literature.
The title translates as The Story Begins, and the essays focus on the beginnings and openings of stories,
Which Oz argues are as important to the fabric of a story as endings.
By analyzing the opening sections of novels and short stories by such writers as Gogol, Kafka, Chekhov and Raymond Carver.
Oz demonstrates how authors make promises they may not deliver on, or deliver promises in unexpected ways, or deliver more than they have promised.

I was introduced to Amos Oz through a short story of his, "Nomad and Viper." The shifting of point of view in that story is amazing, and demonstrates a technical skill lacked by most American authors.

I have been reading Oz's "The Story Begins," and I am not disappointed. This book should be on every writer's bookshelf. In analyzing how various authors begin their stories (some short, some long), Amos Oz allows his readers to begin to perceive many of the finer techniques in beginning a story.

A story's beginning can be lucid, it can draw readers in and make covenants with them, sometimes without the author's cognizance. It are on these covenants, the keeping or breaking of them, that Oz focuses on -- and I do use 'covenant' rather than what's translated to promise because that's the sense of the word I think he intends; I don't know what he wrote in the Hebrew. When an author is faithful to the covenant he made, his story becomes very powerful. Whereas, if the covenant were to have been broken, the opening would be a tease.

I strongly recommend "The Story Begins." It is a book I will have on my bookshelf for some time.