Starred review from September 1, 2020
Internationally best-selling author Nevo and award-winning translator Silverston are five-for-five in enabling Anglophone readers seamless access to Nevo's engrossing novels. Reminiscent of the retired judge in his last title, Three Floors Up (2017), who communicated with her dead husband via answering-machine messages, Nevo again creates another inventive structure to tell a story: an internet-site editor contacts a writer with web-collected questions he agrees to answer. This whole interview?to confess the truth?is an attempt to deal with writer's block in a different text, he reveals. The queries begin with the mundane? Did you always know you would be a writer? ?and quickly progress to the intimate, even inappropriate, yet the writer never refuses an answer, albeit not always offering the answer. A narrative emerges of a peripatetic Israeli writer who returns from a book event in Colombia and confesses a tryst to his no-longer-sleeping wife. While that relationship implodes, the writer reveals other significant emotional disintegrations involving his estranged teenage daughter, his cancer-debilitated best friend, and his missing-for-decades other best friend. And then there's his writing (or not). With just enough autobiographical details (the author's Israeli prime minister grandfather, Levi Eshkol, for example) interwoven to keep readers fixated, Nevo's latest is a clever, delightfully unreliable, occasionally head-shaking, sometimes eye-rolling portrait of an artist as a not-at-all-young man.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)
Starred review from October 1, 2020
An Israeli writer gives an in-depth interview that unravels the story of his life and art. Most interviews purport to expose some previously unknown truth, however trivial, about the interview subject. Nevo's new novel asks the question: What would it mean for the interviewee to actually tell that "truth"--and how might the idea of truth telling be complicated if the interviewee were in the business of fiction writing? In trenchant, lovely prose--beautifully translated by Silverston--Nevo uses the unconventional structure of a literary interview to reveal the cracks in the facade of a writer's relationship to himself, his work, and the world. Nevo excels at revealing--and reveling in--the exquisite within the mundane. As the interviewer moves from question to question, the protagonist leads the reader through various vignettes of his life; though the questions themselves range from basic to profound, each answer pulls the reader further into the protagonist's vibrant inner world. The juxtaposition of the artificial medium of the interview with the increasing vulnerability that the writer displays in his answers is quietly radical. The emotional stakes are further heightened, and the narrative propelled, by the sometimes-jarring nature of this sort of structure: Often, the interviewer interrupts the narrative with a new question just at the point when a section is at its most moving or engrossing. The result is a compelling page-turner of quiet beauty and power. Drawing upon a rich Jewish literary heritage that stretches from Bialik to Oz to Roth, Nevo pushes the boundaries of fiction both formally and thematically, challenging the reader at every turn to reconsider their conceptions of the relationship between truth and fiction. A daring, triumphant work of searing beauty.
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