Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #665398 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-11
• Released on: 2006-07-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Love has many guises in these two novellas—but it never looks like something you'd aspire to. Israeli writer Grossman is more interested in its perverse forms—jealousy, egocentrism, obsession, voyeurism—but also the ways in which we invent the people we love through fantasy. In "Frenzy," Shaul, a respectable academic, feverishly stalks his wife, Elisheva, convinced she has been having an affair with another man for 10 years. He asks his sister-in-law, Esti, to drive him across the country in the middle of the night in search of Elisheva, and as he describes a decade of watching and waiting and imagining every last detail of Elisheva's betrayal, Esti finds herself getting pulled into Shaul's obsession. In "In Another Life," a writer named Rotem visits her estranged mother, Nili, now dying from cancer. Rotem shares her latest story, a fictional exploration of an episode from her childhood in which her mother is the central character. As Rotem reads aloud, Grossman switches back and forth from Rotem's story to the present moment. The reader sees Nili, and then sees her as Rotem imagines her, while the narrative hovers somewhere between memory and fiction. Grossman (See Under: Love, etc.) can capture surprising psychological depth in a single sentence, and here he opens up whole lives on every page.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Known both for his fiction (The Zigzag Kid, 1997) and his political commentary on the Middle East (Death As a Way of Life, 2003), Israeli author Grossman turns here to two novellas of searing psychological intensity. Both stories deal with the pain of betrayal. In Frenzy, Shaul confides to his sister-in-law that he knows about his wife's 10-year love affair. In wrenching detail, he describes the demise of his marriage and his wife's love for another man. The second novella, In Another Life, portrays a thorny relationship between a dying woman and her emotionally blocked daughter. As her mother lies bloated and ill from chemotherapy, Rotem narrates the brutal story of Nili's visceral sensitivity to everyone but her own daughter. In a stream-of-consciousness style that combines magical realism with highly sensual, often erotic descriptions, Grossman explores the relationship between intuitive and verbal communication and illustrates the emotional morass of love gone awry. Jennifer Baker
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

it's all in the passion
This is an engaging exploration of passion, the kind that can grab you and not let go. The two novellas each concern forms of passion that many of us would say verge on the pathological. Grossman sucks you in immediately, making the book hard to put down. The relationship between the mother and daughter in the second novella is especially stunning in its depth and depiction.

Although I mostly have high praise, I had some misgivings with this book. First the unfair criticism. David Grossman wrote probably the best book I have ever read ("See Under: Love"), and nothing I've read of his since comes close. Second, both novellas were structured in a way that almost felt manipulative, somewhat like a crime novel (think DaVinci Code) which you read voraciously to find out what happens. The first novella is a journey, a long car ride, and I was anxiously reading to find out what the obsessed and suspicious husband would do when he finally reached his wife and whether any physical intimacy would arise between him and the woman driving him. The second novella also had two such questions, whether the dying mother would make it to the end of the story and whether, decades earlier, she had had a sexual relationship with a teenage boy whom she was instructing in yoga.

Nevertheless, a middle-of-the-road effort by David Grossman may be one of the best fiction books you will read this year, especially if obsessive passion fascinates you.

"Women's Literature"? Fiddlesticks!!!
This book, which drew me in from the start, and I read it slowly (in the original Hebrew), made me realise how ridiculous it is to talk about 'women's literature', as if only women writers can really understand women enough to write about them. David Grossman gets into the depths of the heart and souls of his protagonists almost better than any woman could, in both these novellas and in "Someone to run with" - you can literally feel all that they feel as you read. Magnificent!

A must
I just could not let go. I read it in a frenzy to get to the end of the story . He goes far to show the capabilities of the humand mind in the first story,where the husband goes round and round in torment and self torture for ten years. The second story was my favorite ,touching the mother daughter relationship.The parts about Yoga ,giving,working with the body,the character of Nili created by the daughter is a real gem.