The Lover (Paperback)

by A. B. Yehoshua (Author) "And in the last war we lost a lover..." (more)
Key Phrases: tightening brakes, long side curls, blushing bright red, Tel Aviv, Old City, Gabriel Arditi (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The author’s first novel-a dreamlike story of a husband’s obsessive search for his wife’s lover amid the turbulence of the Yom Kippur War. “The story of the search has the elegant symmetry of a cut gem” (New Yorker). Translated by Philip Simpson.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Hebrew

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (May 7, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156539128
• ISBN-13: 978-0156539128
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #262,551 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Israel's Faulkner in a tour de force, September 28, 1997

By	[e-mail] (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

In a most unusual storyline, a man searches for his wife's lover in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the meantime, early tension of the Jewish state is plumbed: Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi, man vs. woman, Arab vs. Jew. Told from constantly oscillating viewpoints in the spirit of Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying*, Yehoshua presents a hyperrealistic portrait of modern-day Israel.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite Israeli Novel, January 25, 2003

By	A. B. Cost (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The lover (Hardcover)

This novel, written shortly after the disastrous Yom Kippur war, captures the complexity of Israeli society through the lives of normal participants.

Rather than lambaste the reader with a litany of politics, the book follows the slightly bizarre, but highly symbolic life of an Israeli family as they attempt to find the Wife's lover - a lapsed Jew from France who returned seeking an inheritance.

The story is unpretentious and surprisingly readable. The author's style is to present each new chapter through the voice of a different character, often retelling the same events from several perspectives.

Through these perspectives - a wealthy secular mechanic, a conflicted rebellious teenage girl, an aging zionist intellectual wife, an elderly native sephardic, a ambitious intelligent palestinian boy, and ultimately through the story of the Lover himself - Yehoshua uncovers the complex stuff that constitutes a very strangely formed nation.

Nuanced, delightfully blasphemous accounts of Zionism like this one are not permitted to be spoken here in the US - but of course in Israel, sophisticated debates about the nature of their society are part and parcel of intellectual life.

Enjoy this book. I give it my highest recommendation.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an extraordinary book one of the best contemporary novelists, August 3, 2004

By	Barry McCrea (Brooklyn, NY, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Not only is it a startlingly humane, nuanced and difficult portrait of Israel, by an Israeli, but one of the most profound explorations of humanity in its daily round of work and thought I have read.