Great Hebrew Novels, Bad Sex
The (deliberately) bad sex scenes in four modern Israeli novels reveal writers who play with and subvert expectations and conventions.
Dear readers,
It was a good year for Hebrew novels by me. Four consecutive ones that came my way—one new and three that have been around for a while—moved and intrigued me. I explain why in my new review essay in The Tel Aviv Review of Books, “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Sex.”
Like the three novels I panned in the same publication nearly two years ago (“The NeverEnding Stories”), none of this quartet has been translated into English. Many of you will thus not be able to enjoy them. But, even so, essay offers you a broader and richer perspective on contemporary Israeli literature than you are likely to get from reading the Israeli fiction available to English-speaking readers.
What I’m Reading
Like every avid reader, I am able to read only a fraction of the books I want to read. Even so, I’m always juggling several at a time. As a general rule, I’m reading a Hebrew novel and an English one in parallel, and listening to an audiobook—usually non-fiction or a classic work or a play. There’s always also a work of Jewish philosophy or textual analysis that I read mostly on Shabbat. And there are often a couple others that I peruse intermittently.
Right now the Hebrew novel is Nir Baram’s World Shadow, which I see from his website will soon be published in English translation. It’s my first and long overdue acquaintance with Baram, one of the most important and critically lauded Hebrew novelists writing today. I’m only about fifty pages in, so it’s too early to form an opinion. But I have a lot of sympathy for his protagonist, Gabriel, a young man who, in the 1980s, is suddenly and uncomfortably thrust into the company of Israel’s movers and shakers.
The English novel is Iris Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil. As an avid reader of both novels and philosophical works, I can’t but not appreciate Murdoch’s rare ability to present and turn over philosophical dilemmas through the avenue of fiction. Of the novels of hers I’ve read, it’s the most explicitly dialectic, but without losing the subtlety and surprise and stylistic play of fiction.
The audiobook is Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, an impressively researched and argued and truly frightening book about the dangers presented by big tech companies like Google and Facebook and the way they harvest personal information for profit.
This past Shabbat I completed the third in a trilogy of books by Yishai Mevorach, who reads Hasidic and other Jewish texts in light of postmodern theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. I was skeptical at first but soon found that his view of Judaism as a disturbance in the rational world touched me closely. Unfortunately, these works have not appeared in English.
What I’m Writing
Trying to find time for a rewrite of the novel I’ve been working on for the last couple years, in light of very good comments from agent. And to write those stories in Hebrew that I promised last newsletter.
From the Necessary Stories Archive
What a father sees from his window in the dark of an October night triggers painful memories.
Elsewhere on Substack
Every morning I read an article from those recommended on Arts and Letters Daily. On November 14, it flagged Linda Bartoshuk’s “The Scent of Flavor,” which solved a personal puzzle of mine. Most of what we taste, I was taught in school, is actually what we smell. Yet, after losing nearly all my sense of smell in the wake of a serious illness more than a quarter century ago, I didn’t lose my sense of taste. On the contrary, it’s vivid and sharp. Bartoshuk surveys recent research that explains why.
Regards,
Haim