This deceptively beautiful story may not be A.B. Yehoshua’s finest novel, but it deserves to be ranked with the best. Some of the Amazon reviewers say the English translation from the Hebrew isn’t very good, but I found it thoroughly absorbing through ten days of intermittant reading during a recent trip to Israel. And hated to see the tale end.
Absorbing, in part, because Alef Bet, as the author prefers to be known (for the beginning of the Hebrew alphabet, perhaps meaning sui generis, Latin for unique), takes such pains (without in any way seeming to do so) to put the reader in Israel with the Israelis and their daily lives. And not just “the situation,” as they call the conflict with the Palestinian leadership and the rest of their bad neighborhood’s thugs.
The book’s title has multiple meanings which are gradually revealed throughout the story and the most obvious ones are not the most telling. And the characters, ah, so realistic, the young and the old. If the dialogue sometimes leans towards the expository, each internal narrative is so richly human that you hardly notice. This one is definitely worth your time and money.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 