Customer Reviews

Ten Thousand Lovers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book was wonderful -- beautifully written, an engrossing read, and a nuanced portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Speaking from the vantage point of living in Israel (for the past 38 years), I thought this book wonderfully captures our reality in the Mideast. It also holds out a place where right meets left among Israeli Jews. What a relief! If you believe that only you own the truth, it may be hard to see the strands of integrity in both positions that are depicted here. Thank you, Edeet Ravel, for writing a beautiful and hopeful portrait of Israel. May your pen be fruitful and multiply.

In 1980, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai noted in a lecture that I attended the responsibility of the writer to help their reader understand the nuance of language. Language, he argued, was being appropriated by pundits and politicians in a manner that was systematically degrading the value of the "word".

Edeet Ravel's first novel, a finalist for the Canadian Governor General's Award for literature is a lovely blend exploring language, love, and the rich contradictions of Israeli society in the late 1970s. While the novel has yet to appear in hebrew (I think), Ten Thousand Lovers is among the very first novels to explore the nuances and growing turmoil of Israeli society in the late 1970s. The novel also takes the reader on several insightful excursions on the meaning of hebrew and arabic words informing the dialogue and backdrop in the narrative.

As someone who lived in Israel through much of the period, I found myself swept back to those days from the hitchhiking experiences (which have largely disappeared), to the carefree night life in Tel Aviv (which is still very real), to the confusing conversations over identity between Israelis, Israeli-Arabs, American and Candian Jews, Georgians, Yeminites, and Ethiopians. The politics of of an emerging occupation culture, which everyone who lived through those days fully appreciates, is wonderfully shared through the love relationship between Ami and Lily.

In the past year or two a number of novels have explored the messy vitality of Israeli society (both jewish and arab) in the post 60's era. While not as rich and mature as A.B. Yehoshua's The Liberated Bride, or Open Heart, Ravel's first novel, is an amazing read for its female-centered characters, its insights and glimpses into the invisible realities of Israeli life. I hope she has another manuscript in the works. I can't wait to read it.

Lily returns to Israel during the 1970's and meets handsome Army interrogator Ami. Although attracted to him, she is never quite at ease with the situations his job demand of him. Lily tells the story of her relationship with Ami while also revealing a bit about her present life in England through chapters which flip-flop through the time difference. In addition, there are significant lessons in Hebrew words which add to the flavor of the book and provide insight into Israeli attitudes. The author even adds one recipe to give the taste of the Mideast!

Due to the increasing complexity of political turmoil in Israel and a tendency to be more mainstream, modern Israeli novelists increasingly tend to omit political leanings in their writing. No so Edeet Ravel. She weaves it into the very heart of her story with great eloquence. She expresses her views openly because one cannot live in Israel without revealing those feelings. Beyond that, however, is a more heartbreaking story. It's of how an Israeli woman feels in the company of a man who loves not only her but also his country and has an important duty to both. The end of the story is one of the most powerful that I have read in a novel in a long time, and how the author creates this atmosphere is for the reader to discover.

I think it's very good book
I liked Hebrew words meaning/origin explanation too
I don't think I can share political view of the author, though

As a left-leaning supporter of Israel who has long hoped for a peaceful, two-state solution to the Middle East conflict, I found this book deeply disturbing.
While the writing is beautiful and intelligent and easily worth five stars, the story is marred, in my opinion, by its simplistic analysis of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the world of this novel, peace would be easily achievable if only Israel withdrew from the territories occuppied during the Six Day War, and good Israelis, who are conscious of the plight of the Palestinians, wind up dead, mad or in voluntary exile.
The book contains no reference to the fact that in the 70's, when this novel was set, the Palestinian leadership had the stated goal of destroying Israel, not creating a state alongside her.
As a literary love story, this novel succeeds brilliantly. As a moral fable, it helps perpetuate the dangerous fiction that Israel could have had an easy peace thirty years ago.
And that really is a fairy tale.

A young Canadian-Israeli woman student hitchiking in 1970's Israel gets picked up by a handsome, charming Army employee whose
particular work it is to interrogate Arab prisoners. Her first instinct is to run, but she is seduced by his charm and stays for dinner, and more. As she gets to know him, she points out the differences between American/Canadian interaction and Israel
social manners and styles, frequently breaking off to parse the
Hebrew words and phrases and compare their nuanced meanings to
equivalent English ones. This may sound dull, but it's not: it
is absolutely riveting in helping to respect the roadblocks
between two different genders, nationalities, and languages as
they move together. It is a book which reads easily. My
largest concern was that only one side of the Arab=Israeli conflict is shown sympathetically, and this is wildly unfair.

Excellent view of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The book was an excellent representation of Israel in the 70's. Ravel brought historical events into the books tapestry -covering both Intifadas, the October War of 1973 and several others. She was able to give the reader a real view of how life could have been for both Israelis and their Palestinian counterparts. She drew the reader into the book, and made sure you did not want to stop reading. You develop attachments to the characters very quickly. Ravel did an awesome job, you will not want the book to be over when you are done.

A friend called this "beautiful and haunting", and so I went to the library to read it. At page 60 I began to skip ahead to the end; and then I placed it back on the shelf. What I read would have made a good essay on modern Hebrew and its co-existence with the Arabic from which it borrows certain terms of abuse and really, to Arab ears, abuses them; and it was a good picture of Israel and the everyday theatre of the absurd that Israelis live in. But passion? Emotion? I found the narrator to be an all too credible representative of the academic who sets out one day to write a novel; her 'passion' is a transference of her political 'feelings' into the personal. Real love, real loss? Tension, drama in the telling? None of that came across to me. Maybe her sheeplike promiscuity blinded me to the possibility that this was just stage-setting to her eventual commitment to a real love with all the risk that real love brings. The sex, as well, was far too close to the page; I could smell it, and it was no more erotic than urination or perspiration. It seemed to me that the writer took no risks; that she chose for a safe and uncommitted vantage point a 'passionate' moral outrage that such a fact of life as interrogation should exist; that she set forth her 'humanist-Marxist' allegiance at the start almost as if she expected this to render her immune from all criticism from lower down the mountain. As I see from the other reviews here, that worked, whether it was a culpably conscious strategy or just the natural consequence of being an academic with a great deal of personal security that tends to dampen thought about what it's really like to sit in a prison cell waiting for the punches. Instead, everything came filtered through chat. People who will read this book probably feel passionately about Israel (where I lived as well). That passion itself, I fear, may substitute for judgement. An essay in a magazine, yes. As a story: with harder work she might have tried to tell a more difficult story from the point of view of someone without the advantages of a citizenship and income that allow her to float up and away from real trouble. But this is only the impression I got from the first sixty pages. At that point, I didn't care if the narrator got blown against a wall in the Old City; and I couldn't believe that a soul this comfortable with herself and her self-deceptions ('Men hurt me; they lied to me; I only sleep with everyone because I'm vulnerable') - I couldn't accept that a character as weak as this would attract a lover of any credible stamp. Ami did seem to be a good character and a good man; which shows the mesmerizing power over a male of beautiful blond crinkly hair on a woman whose own character is way out of line with her surface appearance: fool's-gold-blond. 'I don't even know if I like you', she says repeatedly; this after they've shared bodily fluids many times. For me that disconnect between Ami and the narrator merely left bare the artifice of the story. I could no longer imagine the possibility of genuine emotion leading to some cathartic enlightenment at the end. The interrogator dies? The survivor gets to retail a 'story'. About a beautiful, sad, mad country. Not a country that can be understood by academics. A 'haunting' book? Yes, it is: it strikes real fear in me that readers can be so impressionable that a cover blurb really sticks. It's as if one wants to convince oneself that one can still be moved, touched, brought to the tissue box. At least when Beethoven bragged from behind the curtains that he would bring his audience to tears in five minutes, he hit the right chords.

Ten Thousand Lovers has a lot to say about the daily conflicts and commonalities that make up Arab/Israeli life. It was refreshing to see this "hot" topic approached from such an ordinary perspective, even though Ami our main male character has anything but an "ordinary" job. We tend to see so much information that is polarized to one view or another, it's easy to forget that most perspectives are likely much more moderate than those we see on the evening news. I liked Ami and Lily; they were earnest, passionate, and quite believable in the immediacy of their love during turbulent times. I enjoyed the linguistic information which is sprinkled throughout the story, and I think this novel would be an excellent selection for a book club, as their is plenty of fodder for discussion; albeit the discussion could become quite intense in a hurry depending on your political beliefs.

Set in the seventies, the novel demonstrates the political landscape of the newly formed Israel, through its citizens and their personal and professional lives. They are constantly coping, separating/distancing themselves, waiting for disaster.

With the title, Ravel reminds the reader to look beyond the central story. This is the story of one lover, but also ten thousand lovers. It is the story of one couple, but thousands of couples feel this way. In a country that encourages distance for protection, the love of Ami and Lily is bound through intimacy and closeness with each other and with the land.

A very good read -- hard to put down. I cried!