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The Retrospective
An ageing film director, Yair Moses, has been invited to the Spanish pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela to attend a retrospective of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and former muse, settle into their room at the parador, Moses notices a painting depicting the classical story of an elderly prisoner nursing at the breast of a young woman. For the first time in decades, Moses recalls a similar scene from one of his early films, which led to his dramatic estrangement from his screenwriter, Trigano.
Trigano’s spirit haunts the retrospective, as the director and actress re-live each film. They question artistic decisions and are surprised at how differently each remembers the past, slowly revealing to each other past reasons for decisions taken at the time.
A troubled Moses decides to seek out the elusive Trigano to settle their differences, and to propose a new collaboration. But the reluctant screenwriter demands an outrageous price for this reconciliation: Moses must commit to a deeply disturbing act of atonement. Ultimately, reality and the sublime mingle when Moses has an epiphany, as he nears the end of his quest and the source of his imagination.
Searching, witty and trenchant, this work by an internationally respected and original writer is a meditation on the roots of artistic inspiration, the limits and the truth of memory, and the struggle for artistic creation.
Trigano’s spirit haunts the retrospective, as the director and actress re-live each film. They question artistic decisions and are surprised at how differently each remembers the past, slowly revealing to each other past reasons for decisions taken at the time.
A troubled Moses decides to seek out the elusive Trigano to settle their differences, and to propose a new collaboration. But the reluctant screenwriter demands an outrageous price for this reconciliation: Moses must commit to a deeply disturbing act of atonement. Ultimately, reality and the sublime mingle when Moses has an epiphany, as he nears the end of his quest and the source of his imagination.
Searching, witty and trenchant, this work by an internationally respected and original writer is a meditation on the roots of artistic inspiration, the limits and the truth of memory, and the struggle for artistic creation.
392 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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365 people want to read
About the author
A.B. Yehoshua
104 books279 followersAbraham B. Yehoshua (אברהם ב. יהושע) is one of Israel's preeminent writers. His novels include A Journey to the End of the Millenium, The Liberated Bride, and A Woman in Jerusalem, which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2007. He lives in Haifa.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
August 21, 2013
It, is, perhaps, no accident that A.B. Yehoshua names his key character Yair Moses, the spiritual father of the Jews, and the prophet who delivered the nation of Israel out of slavery and into the light.
Moses - an aging and prolific film director whom we first meet during a retrospective of his works in the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela - has spent years in his own creative wilderness after an estrangement from his brilliant and highly creative and unorthodox scriptwriter, Trigano. He has come to Santiago de Compostela for a personal retrospective - to revisit the highly original films that he did with his mercurial collaborator.
While there with Ruth - his leading actress and the one-time lover of Trigano - he notes a painting over his hotel bed, Caritas Romana. This painting will become pivotal in the novel; it represents a prisoner sentenced to starvation who nurses at the breast of his lactating daughter. The painting has long enthralled viewers; the old man who is turned simultaneously into an infant. Indeed, Moses is starving too, and with the exile of Trigano from his life, he is in search of a Muse.
The highly revered "spiritual father" of film is hungry for creative nourishment. His latest films, ironically, employ cameras linger at food feasts and spend many minutes taking in on the details, as if mocking his own creative starvation.
This is an excellent novel with many levels. The most obvious is the plot: Moses, upon receiving his award, wishes to atone and reconcile with Trigano and also to employ him to save their joint creation: the "character" of Ruth. But at its core, it is about the creative process and the reuniting one's creative self with the wellspring of creativity.
A.B. Yohoshua appears fascinated with duality and there are many examples throughout the book: imagination versus reality. Youth versus age. Sephardic versus Askenazi. Religious versus secular. Risk-taking versus playing it safe. Realism versus mysticism. And of course, the most obvious: past versus present.
I wish I were more familiar with A.B. Yehoshua's earlier work: he describes in some detail the films that Moses collaborated on, and I wonder if there are wisps of Yehoshua's own works within them. In any event, it is a joy to read the "stories within stories." As the scrutinizing of duality demands, the first half of the book is grounded in realism; the reader feels right there with Moses, every step of the way. The second half, although anchored in the "real world", shifts into a different kind of more symbolic retrospective, a search for atonement and reconciliation.
This is a mature and confident work by a well-respected Israeli novelist. After reading it, I can well understand why he has earned such a devoted following.
Moses - an aging and prolific film director whom we first meet during a retrospective of his works in the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela - has spent years in his own creative wilderness after an estrangement from his brilliant and highly creative and unorthodox scriptwriter, Trigano. He has come to Santiago de Compostela for a personal retrospective - to revisit the highly original films that he did with his mercurial collaborator.
While there with Ruth - his leading actress and the one-time lover of Trigano - he notes a painting over his hotel bed, Caritas Romana. This painting will become pivotal in the novel; it represents a prisoner sentenced to starvation who nurses at the breast of his lactating daughter. The painting has long enthralled viewers; the old man who is turned simultaneously into an infant. Indeed, Moses is starving too, and with the exile of Trigano from his life, he is in search of a Muse.
The highly revered "spiritual father" of film is hungry for creative nourishment. His latest films, ironically, employ cameras linger at food feasts and spend many minutes taking in on the details, as if mocking his own creative starvation.
This is an excellent novel with many levels. The most obvious is the plot: Moses, upon receiving his award, wishes to atone and reconcile with Trigano and also to employ him to save their joint creation: the "character" of Ruth. But at its core, it is about the creative process and the reuniting one's creative self with the wellspring of creativity.
A.B. Yohoshua appears fascinated with duality and there are many examples throughout the book: imagination versus reality. Youth versus age. Sephardic versus Askenazi. Religious versus secular. Risk-taking versus playing it safe. Realism versus mysticism. And of course, the most obvious: past versus present.
I wish I were more familiar with A.B. Yehoshua's earlier work: he describes in some detail the films that Moses collaborated on, and I wonder if there are wisps of Yehoshua's own works within them. In any event, it is a joy to read the "stories within stories." As the scrutinizing of duality demands, the first half of the book is grounded in realism; the reader feels right there with Moses, every step of the way. The second half, although anchored in the "real world", shifts into a different kind of more symbolic retrospective, a search for atonement and reconciliation.
This is a mature and confident work by a well-respected Israeli novelist. After reading it, I can well understand why he has earned such a devoted following.
November 21, 2019
The Retrospective is a novel chock full of big ideas on the nature of art and the interplay between Ashkenazi Western and Sephardic Eastern cultures in Israel. Like most excellent novels, it also has a carefully plotted story. Most Americans probably won't understand the cultural themes here, but even without that layer of complexity, I'm guessing that The Retrospective will still resonate with smart English speaking audiences. This is a very intelligent book.
Yehoshua creates a stand-in for himself, a golden-aged movie director looking back at his career. He's not afraid to parody his past and throughout the novel there is a healthy mix of the comic and tragic. The director goes to Spain as an honored guest at a retrospective of his career. The journey opens up an old wound, a messy break up with his first screenwriter and muse. The novel follows the director as he tries to retrace his footsteps and ultimately reunite with his old and mercurial screenwriter.
Yehoshua has never been known for compact or lapidary writing and that's true here as well. But he does have a story to tell and he's quite inventive in how he tells it. This is not just a book to read alone and contemplate. It's a perfect book for a thinking person's book club. The Retrospective likely will be the best work of fiction I'll read this year.
Yehoshua creates a stand-in for himself, a golden-aged movie director looking back at his career. He's not afraid to parody his past and throughout the novel there is a healthy mix of the comic and tragic. The director goes to Spain as an honored guest at a retrospective of his career. The journey opens up an old wound, a messy break up with his first screenwriter and muse. The novel follows the director as he tries to retrace his footsteps and ultimately reunite with his old and mercurial screenwriter.
Yehoshua has never been known for compact or lapidary writing and that's true here as well. But he does have a story to tell and he's quite inventive in how he tells it. This is not just a book to read alone and contemplate. It's a perfect book for a thinking person's book club. The Retrospective likely will be the best work of fiction I'll read this year.
October 13, 2017
"Il finale è sempre un compromesso tra ciò che era e ciò che non sarà più."
October 13, 2024
A.B. Yehoshua’s The Retrospective, or Hesed Sepharadi in its original Hebrew title—Spanish (or Sephardic) Charity—is a narrative of cinematic collaboration and personal disintegration. The novel follows Yair Moses, a film director, and his former collaborator, Trigano, a screenwriter. Their once-prolific partnership has disbanded, leaving behind a series of unfinished projects.
The story unfolds through a retrospective of Moses’s early work, presented in the Spanish cathedral town of Santiago de Compostela. Accompanied by a Hebrew-speaking monk, Moses and his actress companion revisit the films they created together. These fabricated plots, dubbed in Spanish, complicate Moses’s often hazy or flawed recollection of his own work.
Cimon, a man condemned to death by starvation, is saved by his daughter’s clandestine breastfeeding. This poignant scene, depicted in a painting hanging in Moses’s hotel, haunts his thoughts. It reflects the tension between transgression and redemption, piety and defiance, comforting needs and unsettling images.
The second half of the novel shifts focus to the breakdown of Moses and Trigano’s partnership. The central question becomes: why was a pivotal scene, involving a heroine nursing an old man, never filmed? Each character—the actress, the estranged screenwriter, the director—offers a different explanation, revealing the complexities of their artistic collaboration and personal dynamics.
Spanish Charity is a formally realist novel, meticulously describing the films at the festival and the meals between screenings. Yet beneath its surface lies a rich array of allegories. The novel explores the tension between imaginative writing and realistic storytelling, the purity of artistic concepts and the compromises of completed works, the class divide in Israeli society, and the historical legacy of the Spanish expulsion of Jews.
While its characters may lack explicit faith, the novel is interwoven with subtle religious threads. It invites us to consider how one can change the existing state of affairs, both in life and in artistic creation, while drawing upon a rich spiritual heritage. By exposing their creative process, Yehoshua invites us to join their journey in search of meaning and origin.
ספר נוגה, מבריק וכתוב לתפארה. נטול הומור כמעט לחלוטין וכשזה קורה האפקט חזק מאוד. יהושע מצליח להחדיר את הקורא אל תוך העלילה(ות) בשימוש מוקפד בזמן הווה ובדרך גאונית של חילופי דוברים אף מצליח להחדיר את הספר אל תוך התודעה, הנפש ומבט עיניו של הקורא. אף על פי שיותר ממחציתו של הרומן נטווה בספרד, הספר הוא ישראלי גרידא. חלק מן הסיפור מתרחש באופן מצמרר בין נתיבות לקיבוץ רעים. להלן תיאור של נפילת רקטה באזור:
... אבל כשמתלקח באופק הֶבהק שהמוזיקה הסוערת במכוניתך כנראה צירפה את רעמו להלמות התופים, אתה מתפלא שהוא עוצר בבת־אחת, מגיח ממכוניתו ומניף יד השמימה, וכשהוא רואה שאתה עדיין מחפש פירוש, הוא מושך אותך ממושבך ומגלגל אותך לתעלה שלצד הכביש ומצמיד את פניך באלימות לאדמה, ואז מרעיד אתכם פיצוץ נוסף, חזק יותר וקרוב יותר, עד שאבנים קטנות נוחתות על ראשך וליקום החוזר לשלוותו מצטרף ניחוח מתַקתַּק של אבק־ שריפה...
The story unfolds through a retrospective of Moses’s early work, presented in the Spanish cathedral town of Santiago de Compostela. Accompanied by a Hebrew-speaking monk, Moses and his actress companion revisit the films they created together. These fabricated plots, dubbed in Spanish, complicate Moses’s often hazy or flawed recollection of his own work.
Cimon, a man condemned to death by starvation, is saved by his daughter’s clandestine breastfeeding. This poignant scene, depicted in a painting hanging in Moses’s hotel, haunts his thoughts. It reflects the tension between transgression and redemption, piety and defiance, comforting needs and unsettling images.
The second half of the novel shifts focus to the breakdown of Moses and Trigano’s partnership. The central question becomes: why was a pivotal scene, involving a heroine nursing an old man, never filmed? Each character—the actress, the estranged screenwriter, the director—offers a different explanation, revealing the complexities of their artistic collaboration and personal dynamics.
Spanish Charity is a formally realist novel, meticulously describing the films at the festival and the meals between screenings. Yet beneath its surface lies a rich array of allegories. The novel explores the tension between imaginative writing and realistic storytelling, the purity of artistic concepts and the compromises of completed works, the class divide in Israeli society, and the historical legacy of the Spanish expulsion of Jews.
While its characters may lack explicit faith, the novel is interwoven with subtle religious threads. It invites us to consider how one can change the existing state of affairs, both in life and in artistic creation, while drawing upon a rich spiritual heritage. By exposing their creative process, Yehoshua invites us to join their journey in search of meaning and origin.
ספר נוגה, מבריק וכתוב לתפארה. נטול הומור כמעט לחלוטין וכשזה קורה האפקט חזק מאוד. יהושע מצליח להחדיר את הקורא אל תוך העלילה(ות) בשימוש מוקפד בזמן הווה ובדרך גאונית של חילופי דוברים אף מצליח להחדיר את הספר אל תוך התודעה, הנפש ומבט עיניו של הקורא. אף על פי שיותר ממחציתו של הרומן נטווה בספרד, הספר הוא ישראלי גרידא. חלק מן הסיפור מתרחש באופן מצמרר בין נתיבות לקיבוץ רעים. להלן תיאור של נפילת רקטה באזור:
... אבל כשמתלקח באופק הֶבהק שהמוזיקה הסוערת במכוניתך כנראה צירפה את רעמו להלמות התופים, אתה מתפלא שהוא עוצר בבת־אחת, מגיח ממכוניתו ומניף יד השמימה, וכשהוא רואה שאתה עדיין מחפש פירוש, הוא מושך אותך ממושבך ומגלגל אותך לתעלה שלצד הכביש ומצמיד את פניך באלימות לאדמה, ואז מרעיד אתכם פיצוץ נוסף, חזק יותר וקרוב יותר, עד שאבנים קטנות נוחתות על ראשך וליקום החוזר לשלוותו מצטרף ניחוח מתַקתַּק של אבק־ שריפה...
July 3, 2017
Sephardic Charity
In the opening of this magnificent book, distinguished Israeli film director Yair Moses arrives at the city of Santiago de Compostela in Northwestern Spain to attend a retrospective of his work. Hanging on the wall in the hotel room which he is to share with his companion Ruth, an actress who has appeared in almost all his films, is a copy of an old Dutch painting representing the theme of Roman Charity. A favorite subject in the 17th century, this depicts a young woman in Ancient Rome who would come secretly to breast-feed her aged father, who has been imprisoned and condemned to die of starvation; you can Google many different versions. Moses suspects that the picture has been hung there on purpose, as a reminder of a scene which was to have ended one of his old films. But the actress, Ruth, had rebelled and Moses, in siding with her, caused a bitter split with his scriptwriter, Shaul Trigano, who had been both Moses' inspiration and Ruth's lover.
Roman Charity by J. C. Verspronck.
A small detail, one might think, but nothing in A. B. Yehoshua's intricately crafted novel is casual. Stuart Schoffman, in an introductory note to his smooth translation, points out that the original Hebrew title, Hesed Sefaradi, could be translated as Sephardic Charity, with the first word meaning either simply Spanish or referring to the strain of Jews from Spain and North Africa to which most of the characters in the novel belong. The subject of the painting has a more general application as a metaphor for an older man trying to drink again from the springs of his youth, but also to seek new life in the daughter art that he himself created—though such analysis is clumsy beside the author's lucid treatment. Even the choice of Santiago as the setting for the first half of the book is not coincidental. Although in real life the site of an annual film festival of a different kind, the town has been a revered pilgrimage destination since the middle ages; whether he intended it or not, Moses' visit turns out to be a painful pilgrimage of his own and eventually a search for absolution. The unexpected religious sympathy between the Catholic priest who organizes the retrospective and Moses, who is a secular Jew, is one of the surprising pleasures of the book, greatly deepening its moral resonance.
Straightforward though it may seem on the surface, I have seldom seen a book that so closely integrated realism with the world of ideas. You can track Moses' movements through the streets of Santiago, and even find pictures of the modern sculptures he sees in one of the squares. When he returns to Israel in the second half of the book, you get an immediate sense of the realities of daily life, crusty taxi-drivers and eager young people, the contrast between a modern hospital and a community of caregivers in the country within rocket reach of Gaza, the tensions not only between races but within the different strands of Jewish society. This is a very real book. But it is also artfully constructed in a way I associate with, say, J. M. Coetzee or Paul Auster. Just as Auster, in The Book of Illusions, uses the fictional work of an old filmmaker to illuminate his modern story, so Yehoshua uses the plots of Moses' early movies shown at his retrospective as keys to unlock everything that follows. The film retrospective forces the director into a personal kind of retrospection, as he returns to understand the implications of his early work and to right the wrongs that may derive from it.
I suspect that Israeli readers may pick up a yet deeper layer of meaning. I rather think that these early films, besides being made at specific times in the young country's history, are also symbolic of its internal ideological divides and difficult relations with its neighbors. On his return, for example, Moses goes back to look at his parents' old house in Jerusalem (all they could afford as a film location at the time), wondering how the cinematographer managed to make it look like three entirely different buildings, an emblem perhaps of a divided country? Visiting the desert site of another early film with a Bedouin guide, and finding the whole thing fenced off as a military installation, he realizes his scriptwriter's probable point: "that a state that turns into a military installation instead of being a living, breathing homeland doesn't deserve soldiers who want to protect it." When he finally meets back up with Trigano himself, the scriptwriter's aggressive absolutism, though defiantly anti-religious, is surely the opposite side of the same coin as the ultra-orthodoxy of many of his compatriots.
But the political elements, like the religious and social ones, are only some of the many themes that thread through this brilliant book. The fictional subject of the painting is echoed in numerous real-life examples of parents and their children. The real journey to Spain evokes thoughts of the fictional Don Quixote, and it is in that no-man's-land between reality and myth that the novel will end, with a beauty that ought not to surprise us but does so nevertheless.
In the opening of this magnificent book, distinguished Israeli film director Yair Moses arrives at the city of Santiago de Compostela in Northwestern Spain to attend a retrospective of his work. Hanging on the wall in the hotel room which he is to share with his companion Ruth, an actress who has appeared in almost all his films, is a copy of an old Dutch painting representing the theme of Roman Charity. A favorite subject in the 17th century, this depicts a young woman in Ancient Rome who would come secretly to breast-feed her aged father, who has been imprisoned and condemned to die of starvation; you can Google many different versions. Moses suspects that the picture has been hung there on purpose, as a reminder of a scene which was to have ended one of his old films. But the actress, Ruth, had rebelled and Moses, in siding with her, caused a bitter split with his scriptwriter, Shaul Trigano, who had been both Moses' inspiration and Ruth's lover.
Roman Charity by J. C. Verspronck.A small detail, one might think, but nothing in A. B. Yehoshua's intricately crafted novel is casual. Stuart Schoffman, in an introductory note to his smooth translation, points out that the original Hebrew title, Hesed Sefaradi, could be translated as Sephardic Charity, with the first word meaning either simply Spanish or referring to the strain of Jews from Spain and North Africa to which most of the characters in the novel belong. The subject of the painting has a more general application as a metaphor for an older man trying to drink again from the springs of his youth, but also to seek new life in the daughter art that he himself created—though such analysis is clumsy beside the author's lucid treatment. Even the choice of Santiago as the setting for the first half of the book is not coincidental. Although in real life the site of an annual film festival of a different kind, the town has been a revered pilgrimage destination since the middle ages; whether he intended it or not, Moses' visit turns out to be a painful pilgrimage of his own and eventually a search for absolution. The unexpected religious sympathy between the Catholic priest who organizes the retrospective and Moses, who is a secular Jew, is one of the surprising pleasures of the book, greatly deepening its moral resonance.
Straightforward though it may seem on the surface, I have seldom seen a book that so closely integrated realism with the world of ideas. You can track Moses' movements through the streets of Santiago, and even find pictures of the modern sculptures he sees in one of the squares. When he returns to Israel in the second half of the book, you get an immediate sense of the realities of daily life, crusty taxi-drivers and eager young people, the contrast between a modern hospital and a community of caregivers in the country within rocket reach of Gaza, the tensions not only between races but within the different strands of Jewish society. This is a very real book. But it is also artfully constructed in a way I associate with, say, J. M. Coetzee or Paul Auster. Just as Auster, in The Book of Illusions, uses the fictional work of an old filmmaker to illuminate his modern story, so Yehoshua uses the plots of Moses' early movies shown at his retrospective as keys to unlock everything that follows. The film retrospective forces the director into a personal kind of retrospection, as he returns to understand the implications of his early work and to right the wrongs that may derive from it.
I suspect that Israeli readers may pick up a yet deeper layer of meaning. I rather think that these early films, besides being made at specific times in the young country's history, are also symbolic of its internal ideological divides and difficult relations with its neighbors. On his return, for example, Moses goes back to look at his parents' old house in Jerusalem (all they could afford as a film location at the time), wondering how the cinematographer managed to make it look like three entirely different buildings, an emblem perhaps of a divided country? Visiting the desert site of another early film with a Bedouin guide, and finding the whole thing fenced off as a military installation, he realizes his scriptwriter's probable point: "that a state that turns into a military installation instead of being a living, breathing homeland doesn't deserve soldiers who want to protect it." When he finally meets back up with Trigano himself, the scriptwriter's aggressive absolutism, though defiantly anti-religious, is surely the opposite side of the same coin as the ultra-orthodoxy of many of his compatriots.
But the political elements, like the religious and social ones, are only some of the many themes that thread through this brilliant book. The fictional subject of the painting is echoed in numerous real-life examples of parents and their children. The real journey to Spain evokes thoughts of the fictional Don Quixote, and it is in that no-man's-land between reality and myth that the novel will end, with a beauty that ought not to surprise us but does so nevertheless.
March 19, 2013
I was expecting much more from this book; I've read Yehoshua before and have liked his sensibility. I thought The Retrospective was self-indulgent and sometimes juvenile. The characters were written as characters in books: they never felt like living, breathing people. Trigano's requirement that Moses suckle on a breast and have a photograph taken was so beyond the ken that I just about thru up my hands in disbelief. Symbol or not, the deliverance Moses felt was plain old silly. Perhaps even embarrassing.
April 8, 2013
Spoiler alert: thumbs way down
Yair Moses, a successful and unctuously polite septuagenarian Israeli film director, is invited to Santiago de Campostela along with Ruth, the star of many of his films with whom he has an ambiguous sexual relationship, for a retrospective of the very early films he had worked on with a former student named Trigano with whom Yair has had a painful break. In the Spanish hotel room he shares chastely with Ruth Yair is immediately drawn to a painting of Roman Charity, a young woman nursing her captive father through prison bars. Yair had excised the final scene based on this painting from one of his films because it was too disturbing to Ruth, and he spends the rest of the story studying the painting, acting out a confession of his aesthetic crimes with a willing priest, trying to re-live the actual settings of his films, and finally, in order to regain the friendship of the angry Trigano, having himself photographed as the old man in the painting.
There are many problems with the novel. First, its lack of originality: as A. B. must know, the old man being nursed by his daughter is the final scene in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Second, the pseudo-Biblical style of the narrative is creaky: A.B. uses epithets rather than describing characters. When he does describe Spanish dining rooms, their walls are usually hung with copper pots. At one point, as if to indicate that Yair is slipping into senility, unable to separate the present from the past or "art" from "reality," the narrative falls into the second person. Third, there is too much discussion of Yair's fear of death and of how old most of the other characters are. There is a lot of ink spent on Yair's hearing aids and his proclivity to urinate out of doors, like a dog. I felt as if I were in an old-folks home surrounded by grizzly navel-gazers.
But how does an old novelist come to terms with the fact that he does not have enough time to tell all his stories? I imagine A.B. working in a room whose walls are covered with story ideas, mostly well worn Israeli urban legends; using the structure of a film retrospective allows A. B. to play films of these corny stories with Yair and Ruth making a lot of noise as they watch the films, and with Trigano later screaming out his anger at how Yair messed with his screenplays. The novel in the end is long and self-indulgent. As a seventy-year-old, I am qualified to judge!
Yair Moses, a successful and unctuously polite septuagenarian Israeli film director, is invited to Santiago de Campostela along with Ruth, the star of many of his films with whom he has an ambiguous sexual relationship, for a retrospective of the very early films he had worked on with a former student named Trigano with whom Yair has had a painful break. In the Spanish hotel room he shares chastely with Ruth Yair is immediately drawn to a painting of Roman Charity, a young woman nursing her captive father through prison bars. Yair had excised the final scene based on this painting from one of his films because it was too disturbing to Ruth, and he spends the rest of the story studying the painting, acting out a confession of his aesthetic crimes with a willing priest, trying to re-live the actual settings of his films, and finally, in order to regain the friendship of the angry Trigano, having himself photographed as the old man in the painting.
There are many problems with the novel. First, its lack of originality: as A. B. must know, the old man being nursed by his daughter is the final scene in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Second, the pseudo-Biblical style of the narrative is creaky: A.B. uses epithets rather than describing characters. When he does describe Spanish dining rooms, their walls are usually hung with copper pots. At one point, as if to indicate that Yair is slipping into senility, unable to separate the present from the past or "art" from "reality," the narrative falls into the second person. Third, there is too much discussion of Yair's fear of death and of how old most of the other characters are. There is a lot of ink spent on Yair's hearing aids and his proclivity to urinate out of doors, like a dog. I felt as if I were in an old-folks home surrounded by grizzly navel-gazers.
But how does an old novelist come to terms with the fact that he does not have enough time to tell all his stories? I imagine A.B. working in a room whose walls are covered with story ideas, mostly well worn Israeli urban legends; using the structure of a film retrospective allows A. B. to play films of these corny stories with Yair and Ruth making a lot of noise as they watch the films, and with Trigano later screaming out his anger at how Yair messed with his screenplays. The novel in the end is long and self-indulgent. As a seventy-year-old, I am qualified to judge!
February 4, 2013
The Retrospective by A.B. Yehoshua is the first book I have read by this extremely talented Israeli author and I look forward to reading other translated works by A.B. Yehoshua. In The Retrospective, Yehoshua weaves together an intricate narrative of life, creativity, art, love, and above all duality. The characters come alive on the pages as does the city of Santiago and all of its beauty. The Retrospective is not a book one picks up to pass the time or read in short order, rather The Retrospective is a book to be savored, contemplated upon, and if at all possible discussed. I am thankful I was given the opportunity to read The Retrospective and highly recommend this book to adult discussion groups as well as readers who enjoy deep, literary works. I look forward to reading more translated works of A.B. Yehoshua.
February 12, 2013
A. B. Yehoshua is an award winning novelist virtually unknown to American readers. A shame. This is fiction at its best -- illuminating, instructive, moving. This will definitely go down as one of the must reads of the year, which is saying a lot since there already has been a wealth of fine fiction in this relatively short time. Moses is a stand-in for Yehoshua himself, a man in his 70s invited to a historic town in Spain to be honored for his body of work. Unable at first to follow the dubbed prints as they are projected to a worshipful audience who seem to know more about him than he does himself, he finds memories are filling in the blanks and he is able to catch up. But this is no simple narrative. Everything about this book is lush, evocative. From the settings to the plots to the characters. Not a cliche among them. Highly recommended.
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April 25, 2013
This is the seventh work I've read of AB Yehoshua, one the 'Three Terrors' of modern Israeli literature (the other two being Amos Oz and David Grossman). Yehoshua is a...complicated man, and this is reflected in his work, for good and ill.
Yehoshua is a Sephardic Jew born and raised in Israel, Jerusalem to be precise, who considers the only truly Jewish life to be one in Israel. The Jewish Diaspora is a non-entity, a fledgling and pale imitation that can't even begin to measure up to the full Jewish actualization that is only possible in Israel. The Diaspora is where Judaism survived, and Israel is where it thrives. Now, notwithstanding how little credence I give to this viewpoint, Yehoshua's views clearly permeate his works, almost to the line. Nationalistic pride mingled with a healthy (read: trivializing) condescension towards Jewish life outside of Israel, and even certain kinds of Jewish life in Israel.
I will only say that during a recent interview on British television to promote this book Yehoshua was confronted by a British journalist who had the audacity to point out, how dare he, holes in the writer's argument. Namely that incredible amounts of fantastic and enriching literature and art and culture had been produced in the Jewish people's long exile, including the codifying of the Torah and its laws. Yehoshua hemmed and hawed, acknowledged those achievements (how considerate of him) and proceeded hammering away despite the buzzing flies of logic and reality, calling the Zionist movement a movement birthed from writers (like him, how modest one might remark).
If from what I've written you glean the idea that Yehoshua is arrogant, congratulations, it's because he is, massively so. He's considered by many to be Israel's equivalent to William Faulkner when in fact he comes off as more an acolyte shoehorning what he considers Faulkner-like passages into his work with all the subtlety, grace, and functionality of a train with no wheels being pushed off a cliff. In point of fact Yehoshua's peccadilloes are suspiciously Norman Mailer like (minus the conviction of real bravado covered by very heavy handed flights of whimsy) in their obsession with the sexually lurid, the violent; and Hemingway-esque with their stoicism of the artistic male and the unfortunate subverting of women in light of that fact.
Now, all that considered, this is actually a good book, very good in fact. Unlike the clunky sludge of Open Heart, the Faulkner flights of fancy are kept to a surprising minimum. And unlike the sentimentalist self indulgent tripe of Friendly Fire, the characters have something to do besides whine and navel gaze (sometimes). This book is not one of Yehoshua's best, but it ranks up there. It's a fascinatingly uneven Chimera work that interweaves several surprisingly different threads of storytelling with a degree of success that says, to me, that Yehoshua has writing chops that, again like Mailer, are more often than not brought down by his hubris.
What we get with this work is one part film study, one part My Dinner with Andre, another part concluding scene to the Grapes of Wrath coupled with Roman art, and a distinctly Israeli flavor to the proceedings that gives the text a soft and languid warmth that, unfortunately, also slows and at times suffocates the text to a maddening stall. Oh, and to not be forgetful, Yehoshua has absolutely no idea how to pace a story, at all, read: at all.
So it's worth a read, maybe even a reread as this is a book with serious depths to explore. And if you can, like I am able occasionally, to separate author from work, then you'll find a rich, painfully slow, but ultimately rewarding novel. Though several ideas are half-developed or quickly rigged to the plot like fresh paint on the Mona Lisa, flashy, nice seeming, but in the end unnecessary. The biggest offenders in this vein are the inclusion of Kafka that Yehoshua botches completely ('Succeeded in making him ((Kafka)) an optimist,'? Spare me) and the fascinating but ultimately somewhat out of place Don Quixote inspired ending, it just felt tacked on to fit the purposes of protagonist Moses' rejuvenation of his artistic soul when any of a number of other sources referenced in the story would have worked substantially better.
Take a chance, it's worth it, but take in the words on the paper rather than the words from the author's own mouth, you'll see quite the divide between the man and his pages.
Yehoshua is a Sephardic Jew born and raised in Israel, Jerusalem to be precise, who considers the only truly Jewish life to be one in Israel. The Jewish Diaspora is a non-entity, a fledgling and pale imitation that can't even begin to measure up to the full Jewish actualization that is only possible in Israel. The Diaspora is where Judaism survived, and Israel is where it thrives. Now, notwithstanding how little credence I give to this viewpoint, Yehoshua's views clearly permeate his works, almost to the line. Nationalistic pride mingled with a healthy (read: trivializing) condescension towards Jewish life outside of Israel, and even certain kinds of Jewish life in Israel.
I will only say that during a recent interview on British television to promote this book Yehoshua was confronted by a British journalist who had the audacity to point out, how dare he, holes in the writer's argument. Namely that incredible amounts of fantastic and enriching literature and art and culture had been produced in the Jewish people's long exile, including the codifying of the Torah and its laws. Yehoshua hemmed and hawed, acknowledged those achievements (how considerate of him) and proceeded hammering away despite the buzzing flies of logic and reality, calling the Zionist movement a movement birthed from writers (like him, how modest one might remark).
If from what I've written you glean the idea that Yehoshua is arrogant, congratulations, it's because he is, massively so. He's considered by many to be Israel's equivalent to William Faulkner when in fact he comes off as more an acolyte shoehorning what he considers Faulkner-like passages into his work with all the subtlety, grace, and functionality of a train with no wheels being pushed off a cliff. In point of fact Yehoshua's peccadilloes are suspiciously Norman Mailer like (minus the conviction of real bravado covered by very heavy handed flights of whimsy) in their obsession with the sexually lurid, the violent; and Hemingway-esque with their stoicism of the artistic male and the unfortunate subverting of women in light of that fact.
Now, all that considered, this is actually a good book, very good in fact. Unlike the clunky sludge of Open Heart, the Faulkner flights of fancy are kept to a surprising minimum. And unlike the sentimentalist self indulgent tripe of Friendly Fire, the characters have something to do besides whine and navel gaze (sometimes). This book is not one of Yehoshua's best, but it ranks up there. It's a fascinatingly uneven Chimera work that interweaves several surprisingly different threads of storytelling with a degree of success that says, to me, that Yehoshua has writing chops that, again like Mailer, are more often than not brought down by his hubris.
What we get with this work is one part film study, one part My Dinner with Andre, another part concluding scene to the Grapes of Wrath coupled with Roman art, and a distinctly Israeli flavor to the proceedings that gives the text a soft and languid warmth that, unfortunately, also slows and at times suffocates the text to a maddening stall. Oh, and to not be forgetful, Yehoshua has absolutely no idea how to pace a story, at all, read: at all.
So it's worth a read, maybe even a reread as this is a book with serious depths to explore. And if you can, like I am able occasionally, to separate author from work, then you'll find a rich, painfully slow, but ultimately rewarding novel. Though several ideas are half-developed or quickly rigged to the plot like fresh paint on the Mona Lisa, flashy, nice seeming, but in the end unnecessary. The biggest offenders in this vein are the inclusion of Kafka that Yehoshua botches completely ('Succeeded in making him ((Kafka)) an optimist,'? Spare me) and the fascinating but ultimately somewhat out of place Don Quixote inspired ending, it just felt tacked on to fit the purposes of protagonist Moses' rejuvenation of his artistic soul when any of a number of other sources referenced in the story would have worked substantially better.
Take a chance, it's worth it, but take in the words on the paper rather than the words from the author's own mouth, you'll see quite the divide between the man and his pages.
April 4, 2016
Una retrospettiva delle sue opere, porta il regista Moses a tirare le somme della propria carriera e della propria vita. Riemergono amicizie spezzate, amori, passioni, malinconia, sullo sfondo di una scena mai girata e mai dimenticata. Un percorso all'indietro carico di simbolismi e riflessioni, che appesantiscono il romanzo, fino alla svolta. Fatto il bilancio, si guarda al futuro, tanto più importante e intenso quanto più si è avanti con gli anni.
April 3, 2016
I truly enjoyed this book, although it was a bit different in style, than A.B. Yehoshua's other books that I have read. At times, I found myself skimming back a few pages in order to reread an excerpt.
July 30, 2013
3.5 Good........
but not my favorite book by Yehoshua!
but not my favorite book by Yehoshua!
May 5, 2023
Outstanding.
May 3, 2013
Per yair Moses, regista israeliano di successo, dopo una carriera pluridecennale è arrivato il momento di guardare al passato, e nel ricordo godersi i suoi successi e rivangare le sconfitte. E l'occasione per far questo è una retrospettiva dei suoi primi film, quando ancora collaborava con Shaul Trigano: geniale e perverso sceneggiatore dal quale si è nel frattempo separato in occasione di una scena così densa di turpi doppi sensi e di violenza recondita che nè lui nè la sua attrice principale Ruth si sono sentiti di portare avanti.
Ma il passato non si lascia abbandonare alle spalle con dei conti rimasti da regolare, e tutto in questa strana retrospettiva sembra condurre all'incontro decisivo tra regista e sceneggiatore, opposti artisticamente e sentimentalmente, attratti come sono entrambi dall'ancor piacente Ruth.
Se ripenso a questo denso ed importante romanzo di Yehoshua, mi resta impresso come cardine e messaggio dell'intera storia un messaggio profondo sul significato dell'arte. Essa si propone come strumento della volontà umana di cambiare il mondo, pertanto non può farsi veicolo di moralità false nè fermarsi di fronte a ritegno alcuno degli uomini di cui si serve. Non esiste arte che non risuoni del perverso e del maligno che c'è in ogni uomo compiacendosene; non esiste arte che si faccia scrupolo di infliggere dolore agli uomini di cui si serve.
Il rifiuto di Ruth e Moses di mettere in scena la turpe immagine di un vecchio che succhia il seno della figlia in cerca di nutrimento (ma sarà solo per questo? O c'è nel la vergognosa lascivia dei biblici vecchioni che circuivano susanna?) ha il significato del rifiuto della compiaciuta immoralità dell'arte. La offesa e rabbiosa rottura di Trigano a seguito di questo rifiuto ne è la riproposizione: quale strada deve prendere l'artista? Non perdere una vocazione educativa ma rischiando di inaridire la sorgente creativa o mostrare un talento zampillante, ma grondante di consapevole perversione? Il geniale sceneggiatore ha già scelto fin dall'inizio, il regista e l'attrice dapprima si ritraggono inorriditi, ma dopo una sofferta evoluzione si rendono conto, ormai avanti negli anni, che non possono ritrovare motivazione ed immaginazione ignorando quest'aspetto. Nell'ultima pagina, protagonista lui stesso di un gesto innocente e perverso, Yair Moses riscoprirà la vocazione perduta.
L'arte come violenza: lo Yair Moses non più produttivo che guarda al passato afferma esplicitamente che il regista saggio non forza la natura del mondo che rappresenta e non violenta la natura dei suoi attori. Ma con questi pensieri si è arenato: questa è una creatività tarpata. Nel cercare il gesto non ci si deve fermare davanti a nessuna sofferenza, come bene mostra di aver imparato Ruth, che non esita ad infliggere al bambino cui sta insegnando a recitare tormenti di gelosia e di autostima ferita pur di averlo più naturale quando entrerà in scena.
Questi aspetti oscuri del gesto artistico sono quanto più mi ha colpito nel romanzo, ma tante altre sono le cose che restituiscono valore. Lo spaccato dello stato di Israele fortemente militarizzato e circondato da nemici, che vive il dramma assoluto di dover considerare la guerra una normalità; la descrizione vivida del mondo cinematografico, di come vive ed opera.
La prima parte del libro, che descrive la retrospettiva dei film diretti da Moses, sceneggiati da Trigano e recitati da Ruth, è abbastanza lenta e pesante. Forse perchè espone ricordi e non azione: se avessi letto quelle pagine fra trent'anni forse avrei avuto un'impressione diversa. Molto scorrevole la seconda parte del libro, piena di tensione verso il finale e bellissimi invece i daloghi, sempre dinamici, che espongono personalità tormentate e perennemente in divenire.
Un romanzo sull' arte e per l'arte, quindi. Ma anche un romanzo sugli uomini e per gli uomini. E' molto difficile mettere per iscritto e spiegare a persone che mancano di quell'estro che cosa significhi creare: secondo me con "la scena perduta" Yehoshua c'è andato molto vicino.
Ma il passato non si lascia abbandonare alle spalle con dei conti rimasti da regolare, e tutto in questa strana retrospettiva sembra condurre all'incontro decisivo tra regista e sceneggiatore, opposti artisticamente e sentimentalmente, attratti come sono entrambi dall'ancor piacente Ruth.
Se ripenso a questo denso ed importante romanzo di Yehoshua, mi resta impresso come cardine e messaggio dell'intera storia un messaggio profondo sul significato dell'arte. Essa si propone come strumento della volontà umana di cambiare il mondo, pertanto non può farsi veicolo di moralità false nè fermarsi di fronte a ritegno alcuno degli uomini di cui si serve. Non esiste arte che non risuoni del perverso e del maligno che c'è in ogni uomo compiacendosene; non esiste arte che si faccia scrupolo di infliggere dolore agli uomini di cui si serve.
Il rifiuto di Ruth e Moses di mettere in scena la turpe immagine di un vecchio che succhia il seno della figlia in cerca di nutrimento (ma sarà solo per questo? O c'è nel la vergognosa lascivia dei biblici vecchioni che circuivano susanna?) ha il significato del rifiuto della compiaciuta immoralità dell'arte. La offesa e rabbiosa rottura di Trigano a seguito di questo rifiuto ne è la riproposizione: quale strada deve prendere l'artista? Non perdere una vocazione educativa ma rischiando di inaridire la sorgente creativa o mostrare un talento zampillante, ma grondante di consapevole perversione? Il geniale sceneggiatore ha già scelto fin dall'inizio, il regista e l'attrice dapprima si ritraggono inorriditi, ma dopo una sofferta evoluzione si rendono conto, ormai avanti negli anni, che non possono ritrovare motivazione ed immaginazione ignorando quest'aspetto. Nell'ultima pagina, protagonista lui stesso di un gesto innocente e perverso, Yair Moses riscoprirà la vocazione perduta.
L'arte come violenza: lo Yair Moses non più produttivo che guarda al passato afferma esplicitamente che il regista saggio non forza la natura del mondo che rappresenta e non violenta la natura dei suoi attori. Ma con questi pensieri si è arenato: questa è una creatività tarpata. Nel cercare il gesto non ci si deve fermare davanti a nessuna sofferenza, come bene mostra di aver imparato Ruth, che non esita ad infliggere al bambino cui sta insegnando a recitare tormenti di gelosia e di autostima ferita pur di averlo più naturale quando entrerà in scena.
Questi aspetti oscuri del gesto artistico sono quanto più mi ha colpito nel romanzo, ma tante altre sono le cose che restituiscono valore. Lo spaccato dello stato di Israele fortemente militarizzato e circondato da nemici, che vive il dramma assoluto di dover considerare la guerra una normalità; la descrizione vivida del mondo cinematografico, di come vive ed opera.
La prima parte del libro, che descrive la retrospettiva dei film diretti da Moses, sceneggiati da Trigano e recitati da Ruth, è abbastanza lenta e pesante. Forse perchè espone ricordi e non azione: se avessi letto quelle pagine fra trent'anni forse avrei avuto un'impressione diversa. Molto scorrevole la seconda parte del libro, piena di tensione verso il finale e bellissimi invece i daloghi, sempre dinamici, che espongono personalità tormentate e perennemente in divenire.
Un romanzo sull' arte e per l'arte, quindi. Ma anche un romanzo sugli uomini e per gli uomini. E' molto difficile mettere per iscritto e spiegare a persone che mancano di quell'estro che cosa significhi creare: secondo me con "la scena perduta" Yehoshua c'è andato molto vicino.
May 19, 2013
I've never read a book by Abraham Yehoshua before. I have several on my TBR, and when I found out that he had another book releasing I wanted to try it on for size before I braved the others. And happily, at least The Retrospective fits me perfectly.
It's a contemplative study on the differences between two headstrong artists, who for a time, walked the same path. They diverged before they actually separated following a fight, and one of them gave up the movies he was so good at completely. The plot of this story concerns atonement, when the director Yair Moses is invited to a retrospective of his earliest films in Spain. He's surprised when the films shown in the retrospective are his earliest ones, his collaboration with the difficult but brilliant screenwriter Shaul Trigano. He's surprised because he has already given these films up as creatively bankrupt, shocking only to provoke. The three day retrospective is also punctuated by his obsession about a painting hanging on the wall of his hotel room, which is remarkably similar to the staging of the scene which was the cause for the ultimate break-up between him and his controlling screenwriter.
The Retrospective is a complex study of one fully realized character, the director Yair Moses. Whether I agree with his viewpoint or not (for the record, I do not, more to follow), I can still understand and admire the richness of his views. Since the primary goal of the book is to look backwards, there's a lot of introspection going on, and it's almost always contrasted with opposing views of whoever discusses the film with the director. He's old, he cannot remember, and in some cases didn't even know the intention behind what was filmed. It makes for a fascinating study, especially for someone who loves films. The Retrospective is also wordy (though always interesting) enough to strongly present the point of view of the characters, its opposition and debates.
Now. Do I agree with the viewpoints? With the crux of the story - Roman Charity and its (non) use in the last of the director's pictures with the screenwriter? With the argument that both the director and the screenwriter treated the woman they loved as a character who had replaced the real human being? A resounding no. It's appalling that Moses considers Ruth to be a responsibility that he would have loved to offload right along with Trigano, but he keeps around still to be true to her character. It's appalling that they would stage scenes without considering how they would affect the lady herself, she being too young and too in love with Trigano to object. It's even more appalling to me that a scene that to me was provocative without much meaning is equated, in hindsight, to Caritas Romanas, which in itself is quite perverse. And that it is then staged for the perversity of an egocentric idiot with, to me, dubious claim to genius, is worse.
This is rare for me, that I would love the plotting of a novel regardless of the strong views it represented. I wish Yehoshua could have won me over, but no. We remain at cross purposes here, but I love the novel nonetheless, considering them flaws of arrogant characters who are, by now, quite old and wrong. 4 stars.
I received a copy of this book for review, via NetGalley.
It's a contemplative study on the differences between two headstrong artists, who for a time, walked the same path. They diverged before they actually separated following a fight, and one of them gave up the movies he was so good at completely. The plot of this story concerns atonement, when the director Yair Moses is invited to a retrospective of his earliest films in Spain. He's surprised when the films shown in the retrospective are his earliest ones, his collaboration with the difficult but brilliant screenwriter Shaul Trigano. He's surprised because he has already given these films up as creatively bankrupt, shocking only to provoke. The three day retrospective is also punctuated by his obsession about a painting hanging on the wall of his hotel room, which is remarkably similar to the staging of the scene which was the cause for the ultimate break-up between him and his controlling screenwriter.
The Retrospective is a complex study of one fully realized character, the director Yair Moses. Whether I agree with his viewpoint or not (for the record, I do not, more to follow), I can still understand and admire the richness of his views. Since the primary goal of the book is to look backwards, there's a lot of introspection going on, and it's almost always contrasted with opposing views of whoever discusses the film with the director. He's old, he cannot remember, and in some cases didn't even know the intention behind what was filmed. It makes for a fascinating study, especially for someone who loves films. The Retrospective is also wordy (though always interesting) enough to strongly present the point of view of the characters, its opposition and debates.
Now. Do I agree with the viewpoints? With the crux of the story - Roman Charity and its (non) use in the last of the director's pictures with the screenwriter? With the argument that both the director and the screenwriter treated the woman they loved as a character who had replaced the real human being? A resounding no. It's appalling that Moses considers Ruth to be a responsibility that he would have loved to offload right along with Trigano, but he keeps around still to be true to her character. It's appalling that they would stage scenes without considering how they would affect the lady herself, she being too young and too in love with Trigano to object. It's even more appalling to me that a scene that to me was provocative without much meaning is equated, in hindsight, to Caritas Romanas, which in itself is quite perverse. And that it is then staged for the perversity of an egocentric idiot with, to me, dubious claim to genius, is worse.
This is rare for me, that I would love the plotting of a novel regardless of the strong views it represented. I wish Yehoshua could have won me over, but no. We remain at cross purposes here, but I love the novel nonetheless, considering them flaws of arrogant characters who are, by now, quite old and wrong. 4 stars.
I received a copy of this book for review, via NetGalley.
November 27, 2013
The Retrospective is the most recent novel by the Israeli novelist to appear in English, published in Israel in 2011 and in the US in 2013. The title, in part, describes a specific event: an Israeli filmmaker’s career is given a retrospective at a film institute attached to a monastery in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. But the director, Yair Moses, is surprised that the scope of the retrospective is confined to his earliest films. Soon he notices the influence of his former partner, the screenwriter Trigano, whose passion for film pulled Moses, Trigano’s high school teacher, into the filmmaking world.
Moses’s companion at the retrospective is Ruth, the actress who has played a part in virtually all of Moses’s films and who had been Trigano’s lover. The three-part partnership ended over the final scene of one of Trigano’s screenplays. In it Ruth’s character, who had just given up her newborn for adoption, pauses in the street to give suckle to an old man. Ruth refused to play the scene, the director sided with her and the screenwriter consequently ended his relationship with both Moses and Ruth.
The monk in charge of the film institute and the filmmaker’s late cinematographer add dimensions that complicate the larger retrospection that Moses finds himself undergoing as a result of the honor he receives in Santiago de Compostela. Both his aesthetic and ethical judgments are called into question. Further complicating matters is Ruth’s generally platonic relationship with Moses. There is also the shadow of a neglected illness of Ruth’s that also aggravates her relationship with Moses, who nags her to follow-up on her medical tests. Finally, there are the uncertain prospects of Moses’s next project, which doesn’t include Ruth for the first time.
Certain themes (love, loyalty, artistic and personal integrity, among others) pervade the novel and one classical motif does as well. Caritas Romana (Roman Charity), a classical and Renaissance treatment of a Latin myth of a woman who breast-feeds her father who has been imprisoned without food (execution by starvation) is also critical to The Retrospective. It’s an image that anticipated the scene Ruth refused to play decades earlier. Neither the director nor screenwriter was aware of Caritas Romana at the time Trigano wrote his screenplay. The long history of the theme wouldn’t have made it any less controversial and the fundamental challenge to the story and image remains. Is it an act of selfless generosity or one of erotic exploitation? Moses studies the painting, the myth and its various depictions and in his retrospection the question is relevant both to his decision to change his long ago film’s ending and the use he makes of stories for his films and his relationships with his collaborators.
Yehoshua also pulls off a pretty amazing narrative feat, integrating film synopses into storytelling which are both strongly visual and fully convincing as descriptions of actual works. You want to see the movies he describes and almost feel you do. He is a skilled and subtle writer whose plots and characters are anything but simple but always engaging and true to the nature of most human dilemmas, simple or complex, commonplace or unique to character or circumstance. He writes emotionally powerful philosophical novels that are compellingly and candidly human.
Moses’s companion at the retrospective is Ruth, the actress who has played a part in virtually all of Moses’s films and who had been Trigano’s lover. The three-part partnership ended over the final scene of one of Trigano’s screenplays. In it Ruth’s character, who had just given up her newborn for adoption, pauses in the street to give suckle to an old man. Ruth refused to play the scene, the director sided with her and the screenwriter consequently ended his relationship with both Moses and Ruth.
The monk in charge of the film institute and the filmmaker’s late cinematographer add dimensions that complicate the larger retrospection that Moses finds himself undergoing as a result of the honor he receives in Santiago de Compostela. Both his aesthetic and ethical judgments are called into question. Further complicating matters is Ruth’s generally platonic relationship with Moses. There is also the shadow of a neglected illness of Ruth’s that also aggravates her relationship with Moses, who nags her to follow-up on her medical tests. Finally, there are the uncertain prospects of Moses’s next project, which doesn’t include Ruth for the first time.
Certain themes (love, loyalty, artistic and personal integrity, among others) pervade the novel and one classical motif does as well. Caritas Romana (Roman Charity), a classical and Renaissance treatment of a Latin myth of a woman who breast-feeds her father who has been imprisoned without food (execution by starvation) is also critical to The Retrospective. It’s an image that anticipated the scene Ruth refused to play decades earlier. Neither the director nor screenwriter was aware of Caritas Romana at the time Trigano wrote his screenplay. The long history of the theme wouldn’t have made it any less controversial and the fundamental challenge to the story and image remains. Is it an act of selfless generosity or one of erotic exploitation? Moses studies the painting, the myth and its various depictions and in his retrospection the question is relevant both to his decision to change his long ago film’s ending and the use he makes of stories for his films and his relationships with his collaborators.
Yehoshua also pulls off a pretty amazing narrative feat, integrating film synopses into storytelling which are both strongly visual and fully convincing as descriptions of actual works. You want to see the movies he describes and almost feel you do. He is a skilled and subtle writer whose plots and characters are anything but simple but always engaging and true to the nature of most human dilemmas, simple or complex, commonplace or unique to character or circumstance. He writes emotionally powerful philosophical novels that are compellingly and candidly human.
Read
February 2, 2013It, is, perhaps, no accident that A.B. Yehoshua names his key character Yair Moses, the spiritual father of the Jews, and the prophet who delivered the nation of Israel out of slavery and into the light.
Moses – an aging and prolific film director whom we first meet during his retrospective in the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela – has spent years in his own creative wilderness after an estrangement from his brilliant and highly creative and unorthodox scriptwriter, Trigano. He has come to Santiago de Compostela for a reconciliation of sorts – to revisit the highly original films that he did with his mercurial collaborator.
While there with Ruth – his leading actress and the one-time lover of Trigano – he notes a painting over his hotel bed, Caritas Romana. This painting will become pivotal in the novel; it represents a prisoner sentenced to starvation who nurses at the breast of his lactating daughter. The painting has long enthralled viewers; the old man who is turned simultaneously into an infant. Indeed, Moses is starving too, and with the exile of Trigano from his life, he is in search of a Muse.
The highly revered “spiritual father” of film is hungry for creative nourishment. His latest films, ironically, employ cameras linger at food feasts and spend many minutes taking in on the details, as if mocking his own creative starvation.
This is an excellent novel with many levels. The most obvious is the plot: Moses, upon receiving his award, wishes to atone and reconcile with Trigano and also to employ him to save their joint creation: the “character” of Ruth. But at its core, it is about the creative process and the reuniting of one’s creative self with the wellspring of creativity.
A.B. Yohoshua appears fascinated with duality and there are many examples throughout the book: imagination versus reality. Youth versus age. Sephardic versus Askenazi. Religious versus secular. Risk-taking versus playing it safe. Realism versus mysticism. And of course, the most obvious: past versus present.
I wish I were more familiar with A.B. Yehoshua’s earlier work: he describes in some detail the films that Moses collaborated on, and I wonder if there are wisps of Yehoshua’s own works within them. In any event, it is a joy to read the “stories within stories.” As the scrutinizing of duality demands, the first half of the book is grounded in realism; the reader feels right there with Moses, every step of the way. The second half, also anchored in reality shifts into a different kind of symbolic retrospective, a deeper search for atonement and reconciliation.
This is a mature and confident work by a well-respected Israeli novelist. After reading it, I can well understand why he has earned such a devoted following.
Moses – an aging and prolific film director whom we first meet during his retrospective in the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela – has spent years in his own creative wilderness after an estrangement from his brilliant and highly creative and unorthodox scriptwriter, Trigano. He has come to Santiago de Compostela for a reconciliation of sorts – to revisit the highly original films that he did with his mercurial collaborator.
While there with Ruth – his leading actress and the one-time lover of Trigano – he notes a painting over his hotel bed, Caritas Romana. This painting will become pivotal in the novel; it represents a prisoner sentenced to starvation who nurses at the breast of his lactating daughter. The painting has long enthralled viewers; the old man who is turned simultaneously into an infant. Indeed, Moses is starving too, and with the exile of Trigano from his life, he is in search of a Muse.
The highly revered “spiritual father” of film is hungry for creative nourishment. His latest films, ironically, employ cameras linger at food feasts and spend many minutes taking in on the details, as if mocking his own creative starvation.
This is an excellent novel with many levels. The most obvious is the plot: Moses, upon receiving his award, wishes to atone and reconcile with Trigano and also to employ him to save their joint creation: the “character” of Ruth. But at its core, it is about the creative process and the reuniting of one’s creative self with the wellspring of creativity.
A.B. Yohoshua appears fascinated with duality and there are many examples throughout the book: imagination versus reality. Youth versus age. Sephardic versus Askenazi. Religious versus secular. Risk-taking versus playing it safe. Realism versus mysticism. And of course, the most obvious: past versus present.
I wish I were more familiar with A.B. Yehoshua’s earlier work: he describes in some detail the films that Moses collaborated on, and I wonder if there are wisps of Yehoshua’s own works within them. In any event, it is a joy to read the “stories within stories.” As the scrutinizing of duality demands, the first half of the book is grounded in realism; the reader feels right there with Moses, every step of the way. The second half, also anchored in reality shifts into a different kind of symbolic retrospective, a deeper search for atonement and reconciliation.
This is a mature and confident work by a well-respected Israeli novelist. After reading it, I can well understand why he has earned such a devoted following.
May 19, 2013
It’s intriguing that in every novel by Yehoshua over the past fifteen years, beginning with A Journey to the End of the Millenium in 1999 and including his latest, A Retrospective, the main character leaves Israel proper to go on a journey. These journeys into the wider world seem to open the characters to new possibilities for self-awareness and engagement with others.
The Retrospective (The Hebrew title, Hesed Sepharadi, means Spanish--or Sephardic—Kindness) offers us an inside look at the creative process of a master storyteller. The main character is not a fiction writer like Yehoshua, who has complete control over his creations, but a celebrated film director, Yair Moses, who creates his works in close collaboration with others. In Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, Spain, the aging director, accompanied by his lifelong female lead and sometime lover, Ruth, attends a retrospective of his films that focuses, surprisingly on his earliest films, works that Moses barely remembers. As the films unroll, we learn about the process by which each film took shape, as Moses recalls the vision that he strove for and the modifications that occurred.
Since film is a collaborative medium, the retrospective also forces Moses to recall the history of his relationships with his early collaborators: Ruth, still a close companion, his cinematographer Toledano, and especially, Trigano the ardent young student and screenwriter who first drew both his teacher, Moses, and his childhood friend Ruth into the strange new world of filmmaking and who became Ruth’s lover. Trigano and Moses had an agreement: Moses would transfer Trigano’s screenplays to the screen unaltered and in turn, Trigano would not interfere with Moses’s work as director. Eventually, though, Moses did depart from one of Trigano’s screenplays, because the scene that Trigano envisioned did not sit well with Moses or Ruth. This led to an irrevocable breach between Trigano and his two collaborators, and Moses and Trigano have not spoken to one another since. The retrospective in Spain prompts Moses to revisit this episode and to reexamine his feelings about both Ruth and Trigano. Eventually, it leads him to embark on a daring effort at atonement.
The twin focus on the creative process and on interpersonal dynamics and concomitant intrapersonal soul searching make this a rich story, and an expertly rendered one at that, even though the plot, upon sober reflection, seems a little contrived. As for the act of atonement that Moses attempts, I found it jarring and the end puzzling and, therefore, I invite others to share their reactions.
The Retrospective (The Hebrew title, Hesed Sepharadi, means Spanish--or Sephardic—Kindness) offers us an inside look at the creative process of a master storyteller. The main character is not a fiction writer like Yehoshua, who has complete control over his creations, but a celebrated film director, Yair Moses, who creates his works in close collaboration with others. In Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, Spain, the aging director, accompanied by his lifelong female lead and sometime lover, Ruth, attends a retrospective of his films that focuses, surprisingly on his earliest films, works that Moses barely remembers. As the films unroll, we learn about the process by which each film took shape, as Moses recalls the vision that he strove for and the modifications that occurred.
Since film is a collaborative medium, the retrospective also forces Moses to recall the history of his relationships with his early collaborators: Ruth, still a close companion, his cinematographer Toledano, and especially, Trigano the ardent young student and screenwriter who first drew both his teacher, Moses, and his childhood friend Ruth into the strange new world of filmmaking and who became Ruth’s lover. Trigano and Moses had an agreement: Moses would transfer Trigano’s screenplays to the screen unaltered and in turn, Trigano would not interfere with Moses’s work as director. Eventually, though, Moses did depart from one of Trigano’s screenplays, because the scene that Trigano envisioned did not sit well with Moses or Ruth. This led to an irrevocable breach between Trigano and his two collaborators, and Moses and Trigano have not spoken to one another since. The retrospective in Spain prompts Moses to revisit this episode and to reexamine his feelings about both Ruth and Trigano. Eventually, it leads him to embark on a daring effort at atonement.
The twin focus on the creative process and on interpersonal dynamics and concomitant intrapersonal soul searching make this a rich story, and an expertly rendered one at that, even though the plot, upon sober reflection, seems a little contrived. As for the act of atonement that Moses attempts, I found it jarring and the end puzzling and, therefore, I invite others to share their reactions.
October 19, 2014
I enjoyed this typically complex Yehoshua, with its intertwined themes and complex metaphors. Yair Moses, the protagonist, resembles all the main characters of the Yehoshua novels I've read -- typically a middle aged or older man, loveable, ethical but deeply flawed and annoying. As usual the protagonist is someone I'm awfully grateful not to have married.
The Sephardi / Ashkenazi dichotomy in Israeli society is interestingly used. It is used in this novel, not as a complaint about inequality but as Trigano’s excuse for his rage and absolutism. Ironically, the Sephardim pride themselves as not being so rigid as the Ashkenazim.
Ruth, also from North Africa, is admired for her beauty – as a North African, not in spite of the difference.
Trigano, of North African Sephardi descent is counterposed as the fanatical artist artist willing to sacrifice people's well-being and his relationships to his screenplays. Moses, who never, like his namesake, makes it into the 'promised land' of great art film directors, does not do so. Moses' films feature many and long scenes about food and eating. Not only does this contrast with Trigano in concentrating and perhaps even glorifying the beauty and pleasure to be found in daily existence, it is certainly connected to Moses' becoming fascinated by the painting of Caritas Romana in his hotel room. When visiting Trigano at the residence where his son is taken care of, Moses cannot eat. Without resolving his conflict with Trigano, he cannot take satisfaction, in spite of the pressure to please the caretakers who have made the meal.
Caritas Romana, a Roman story, depicted variously by painters since the Renaissance, is the leitmotif. David Fleiss suggests that "Chesed Sephardi" is what Moses experiences in Spain and enacts by making an act of atonement on Trigano's terms. Acting out the painting, and Moses' reaction, end, or more properly, climax the novel. Yehoshua is wryly making a statement about the basic infantile nature of adult males.
An important theme is abusing or using up others in the name of one’s artic goals. This is of course all bound up with Caritas Romana, an image evoking conflicting feelings – particularly revulsion and admiration (of a daughter willing to break taboos to save her starving father). After Trigano’s break with him, Moses never again directed “great films” worthy of a retrospective. But, he can live with himself, as he states, as he has never again putthe actress Ruth in the brutal or obscene scenes Trigano demanded of her. Perhaps Trigano’s “imperfect” son is meant to remind us that perfection in nature is impossible or at least very random.
The Sephardi / Ashkenazi dichotomy in Israeli society is interestingly used. It is used in this novel, not as a complaint about inequality but as Trigano’s excuse for his rage and absolutism. Ironically, the Sephardim pride themselves as not being so rigid as the Ashkenazim.
Ruth, also from North Africa, is admired for her beauty – as a North African, not in spite of the difference.
Trigano, of North African Sephardi descent is counterposed as the fanatical artist artist willing to sacrifice people's well-being and his relationships to his screenplays. Moses, who never, like his namesake, makes it into the 'promised land' of great art film directors, does not do so. Moses' films feature many and long scenes about food and eating. Not only does this contrast with Trigano in concentrating and perhaps even glorifying the beauty and pleasure to be found in daily existence, it is certainly connected to Moses' becoming fascinated by the painting of Caritas Romana in his hotel room. When visiting Trigano at the residence where his son is taken care of, Moses cannot eat. Without resolving his conflict with Trigano, he cannot take satisfaction, in spite of the pressure to please the caretakers who have made the meal.
Caritas Romana, a Roman story, depicted variously by painters since the Renaissance, is the leitmotif. David Fleiss suggests that "Chesed Sephardi" is what Moses experiences in Spain and enacts by making an act of atonement on Trigano's terms. Acting out the painting, and Moses' reaction, end, or more properly, climax the novel. Yehoshua is wryly making a statement about the basic infantile nature of adult males.
An important theme is abusing or using up others in the name of one’s artic goals. This is of course all bound up with Caritas Romana, an image evoking conflicting feelings – particularly revulsion and admiration (of a daughter willing to break taboos to save her starving father). After Trigano’s break with him, Moses never again directed “great films” worthy of a retrospective. But, he can live with himself, as he states, as he has never again putthe actress Ruth in the brutal or obscene scenes Trigano demanded of her. Perhaps Trigano’s “imperfect” son is meant to remind us that perfection in nature is impossible or at least very random.
June 29, 2016
Io sono di questa idea qui: se vuoi fare lo scrittore, devi avere anche un po' di umiltà, scrivendo libri lunghi proporzionalmente a quanto pensi di poter impiegare il lettore. Se pensi di essere un grande scrittore, allora va bene, puoi provare a rifilarmi un libro di 500 pagine. Sei un immenso scrittore? Ne accetto anche mille. Ma se sei "solamente" un buon scrittore, allora forse è meglio se ti concentri su un numero ridotto di pagine, facciamo 2-300, ma fermati lì. Perché? Perché, caro scrittore, devi pensare che il tempo che tu mi rubi per leggere le tue 100-200-500 pagine in più lo rubi a me come lettore e lo rubi a un altro scrittore, magari più importante di te, e che io, tapino, ancora non ho preso in mano. Brutto, nevvero?
Detto questo, passiamo a "La scena perduta".
Yehoshua. Questo scrittore israeliano non è proprio un novellino, ha oramai quasi ottanta anni e ha scritto una decina di libri, più saggi e opere teatrali varie. Chiaramente non lo conoscevo e questo libro, in wishlist un po' per caso da un anno, riesco a recuperarlo solo adesso. Così lo metto in lettura per provare qualcosa di nuovo, ché di gran libri scritti da israeliani e con tema la cinematografia e l'arte non me ne capitano spesso in mano, non so a voi. Bene, il libro non è brutto. È abbastanza scorrevole, leggibile, la trama interessante e originale (parliamo di vecchi rancori fra un regista e il suo sceneggiatore, riaccesa da una retrospettiva in terra spagnola che porta i due a riprendere i contatti), e tutto il resto.
Ma la lunghezza, Yehoshua? Scherziamo? Oltre 350 pagine per sviluppare un tema che potevi condensarmi in 200? Non è che il nostro si dilunghi nelle varie situazioni (anzi, a volte sembra quasi aver tagliato di netto certe scene giusto per accorciare il romanzo), ma c'è un sovrabbondare di informazioni inutili e vagamente ripetitive che da uno scrittore navigato non mi sarei aspettato. Arrivato a metà libro, dopo due intense giornate di letture, sono rimasto a bocca aperta: che cosa dovevi ancora raccontarmi per altre 200 pagine che oramai non mi avessi già ampiamente descritto o fatto presagire? Niente.
Non voglio essere duro con questo libro, anzi, se la trama vi sembra interessante vi consiglio comunque di prenderlo in mano. Ma per me sono 3 stelline e mezzo, che declasso a 3 perché davvero, mi ha lasciato un senso di sconforto. Quanto a te, Yehoshua, rimandato a settembre, ché la nostra conoscenza non si ferma qui, ma è meglio pensarci sopra un altro po'.
Detto questo, passiamo a "La scena perduta".
Yehoshua. Questo scrittore israeliano non è proprio un novellino, ha oramai quasi ottanta anni e ha scritto una decina di libri, più saggi e opere teatrali varie. Chiaramente non lo conoscevo e questo libro, in wishlist un po' per caso da un anno, riesco a recuperarlo solo adesso. Così lo metto in lettura per provare qualcosa di nuovo, ché di gran libri scritti da israeliani e con tema la cinematografia e l'arte non me ne capitano spesso in mano, non so a voi. Bene, il libro non è brutto. È abbastanza scorrevole, leggibile, la trama interessante e originale (parliamo di vecchi rancori fra un regista e il suo sceneggiatore, riaccesa da una retrospettiva in terra spagnola che porta i due a riprendere i contatti), e tutto il resto.
Ma la lunghezza, Yehoshua? Scherziamo? Oltre 350 pagine per sviluppare un tema che potevi condensarmi in 200? Non è che il nostro si dilunghi nelle varie situazioni (anzi, a volte sembra quasi aver tagliato di netto certe scene giusto per accorciare il romanzo), ma c'è un sovrabbondare di informazioni inutili e vagamente ripetitive che da uno scrittore navigato non mi sarei aspettato. Arrivato a metà libro, dopo due intense giornate di letture, sono rimasto a bocca aperta: che cosa dovevi ancora raccontarmi per altre 200 pagine che oramai non mi avessi già ampiamente descritto o fatto presagire? Niente.
Non voglio essere duro con questo libro, anzi, se la trama vi sembra interessante vi consiglio comunque di prenderlo in mano. Ma per me sono 3 stelline e mezzo, che declasso a 3 perché davvero, mi ha lasciato un senso di sconforto. Quanto a te, Yehoshua, rimandato a settembre, ché la nostra conoscenza non si ferma qui, ma è meglio pensarci sopra un altro po'.
July 4, 2016
Read my review on New York Journal of Books first. Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.
A.B. Yehoshua's new novel The Retrospective is a book I enjoyed reading while I was reading it but one that left me somewhat disappointed afterward. In my New York Journal of books review I explore the novel's multiple allegories and describe it as "a quick and easy read" despite its layers of meaning. My use of the phrase "quick and easy" may have something to do with the fact that I read The Retrospective shortly after reading William Gass' comparatively difficult novel Middle C. I actually prefer dense prose and more challenging use of language, but Mr. Yehoshua's naturalistic dialogue as well as his use of symbolism and allegory kept me engaged.
The Retrospective is an autobiographical novel in which cinema stands in for fiction and a film director represents the novelist. Indeed the director attends a retrospective of his early films and receives a prize in Santiago de Compostela, the same Spanish city where his author was awarded a literature prize. The novel's Hebrew title can be translated as Spanish Charity and its central image is Roman Charity, a story of a daughter who breast feeds her starving father depicted in numerous Renaissance paintings. Pardon the pun, but Mr. Yehoshua milks the image for all the symbolic and allegorical meaning it can yield. See my New York Journal of Books review for a fuller discussion of those allegories.
A.B. Yehoshua's new novel The Retrospective is a book I enjoyed reading while I was reading it but one that left me somewhat disappointed afterward. In my New York Journal of books review I explore the novel's multiple allegories and describe it as "a quick and easy read" despite its layers of meaning. My use of the phrase "quick and easy" may have something to do with the fact that I read The Retrospective shortly after reading William Gass' comparatively difficult novel Middle C. I actually prefer dense prose and more challenging use of language, but Mr. Yehoshua's naturalistic dialogue as well as his use of symbolism and allegory kept me engaged.
The Retrospective is an autobiographical novel in which cinema stands in for fiction and a film director represents the novelist. Indeed the director attends a retrospective of his early films and receives a prize in Santiago de Compostela, the same Spanish city where his author was awarded a literature prize. The novel's Hebrew title can be translated as Spanish Charity and its central image is Roman Charity, a story of a daughter who breast feeds her starving father depicted in numerous Renaissance paintings. Pardon the pun, but Mr. Yehoshua milks the image for all the symbolic and allegorical meaning it can yield. See my New York Journal of Books review for a fuller discussion of those allegories.
October 23, 2012
Abraham Yehoshua sa scrivere ancora con la prosa suggestiva, i dialoghi profondi, i personaggi così vividi che l'hanno reso giustamente famoso ma, come già traspariva nel precedente "Fuoco amico", non sembra più in grado di applicare il suo talento e la sua sensibilità a soggetti degni di particolare interesse.
Questo "La scena perduta" ad esempio ci narra le vicende di un anziano regista e, retrospettivamente, di tutta una troupe ormai dispersa, lo sceneggiatore, l'attrice, il direttore della fotografia, gli attori occasionali, eccetera: i personaggi, colti singolarmente, hanno qualità umane ed espressive per "tenere la scena" ma l'insieme sembra privo di nerbo, con una prima metà del romanzo incentrata su una retrospettiva organizzata in Spagna in onore del regista dove ci viene presentata, anzi addirittura proiettata, la filmografia immaginaria di Yair Moses, con dettagli sulle locations, le scenografie, le luci, gli interpreti, che francamente alla lunga annoiano.
Il confronto fra i personaggi al di fuori del set, soprattutto lo scontro mai risanato fra regista e sceneggiatore, presenta elementi drammaturgici più interessanti ma non riesce comunque a risollevare le sorti del romanzo in cui, sembra un paradosso, ciò che fa più difetto pare proprio la regia! Si ha l'impressione di un autore stanco, come il suo protagonista, che ha mantenuto i ferri del mestiere e la voglia di utilizzarli ma ha perduto l'ispirazione, come brutalmente gli rinfaccia il ruvido e livoroso sceneggiatore...
Questo "La scena perduta" ad esempio ci narra le vicende di un anziano regista e, retrospettivamente, di tutta una troupe ormai dispersa, lo sceneggiatore, l'attrice, il direttore della fotografia, gli attori occasionali, eccetera: i personaggi, colti singolarmente, hanno qualità umane ed espressive per "tenere la scena" ma l'insieme sembra privo di nerbo, con una prima metà del romanzo incentrata su una retrospettiva organizzata in Spagna in onore del regista dove ci viene presentata, anzi addirittura proiettata, la filmografia immaginaria di Yair Moses, con dettagli sulle locations, le scenografie, le luci, gli interpreti, che francamente alla lunga annoiano.
Il confronto fra i personaggi al di fuori del set, soprattutto lo scontro mai risanato fra regista e sceneggiatore, presenta elementi drammaturgici più interessanti ma non riesce comunque a risollevare le sorti del romanzo in cui, sembra un paradosso, ciò che fa più difetto pare proprio la regia! Si ha l'impressione di un autore stanco, come il suo protagonista, che ha mantenuto i ferri del mestiere e la voglia di utilizzarli ma ha perduto l'ispirazione, come brutalmente gli rinfaccia il ruvido e livoroso sceneggiatore...
January 30, 2012
Yair Moses, settantenne regista cinematografico israeliano, appartenente ad una famiglia laica di Gerusalemme originaria della Germania, viene invitato, quale ospite d’onore, ad una retrospettiva dei suoi film, organizzata da un’insolita associazione di cinefili nella più scenografica ed insolita tra le città spagnole, Santiago de Compostela. Un luogo che non dimentichi, anche se ci sei stato solo una volta. Visionario e misterioso è l’ultimo romanzo di Abraham B. Yehosua, La scena perduta, il cui titolo originale, Hessed sfaradì, Carità spagnola, riecheggia in modo emblematico una scena del tardo mondo classico, che è il perno di tutta l’opera. Yair divide la camera d’albergo -un tempo ospedale per pellegrini, situato in una vasta, silenziosa piazza accanto alla Cattedrale- con Ruth, un’attrice ormai matura, ma ancora ricca di fascino, protagonista di tutti i suoi film ed ora saltuaria compagna. Ad una parete della stanza ben presto egli vede appeso un quadro, che lo fa ritornare indietro nel tempo.
Continua su:
http://www.lastambergadeilettori.com/...
Continua su:
http://www.lastambergadeilettori.com/...
May 23, 2012
Mi sono annoiata per buona parte del libro, ma la storia in sé mi è piaciuta e mi ha spinta ad andare avanti con la lettura. Le parti che mi hanno annoiato sono le rivisitazioni dei film girati dal protagonosta del libro, che vengono descritte con inutile dovizia di particolari. Mi ha intrigato invece il racconto della scena perduta e della Caritas romana; inoltre, come ne La sposa liberata (che mi era piaciuto tantissimo), anche in questo romanzo i personaggi sono umanissimi e anche qui viene sottolineata la necessità di superare il divario tra le persone, l'importanza di perdonarsi e riappacificarsi.
"- Ancora con 'sto abisso? Lo fai diventare più profondo di momento in momento. E anche più cupo. Se c'è un abisso tra noi allora scendiamoci dentro e andiamo a controllare come stanno le cose. Basta con la testardaggine e l'orgoglio. Mi vedi? Sono un vecchio insegnante venuto da te con buone intenzioni. Un pellegrino convertito".
-Convertito?- Trigano sorride scettico. - Convertito a cosa?
- A te."
"- Ancora con 'sto abisso? Lo fai diventare più profondo di momento in momento. E anche più cupo. Se c'è un abisso tra noi allora scendiamoci dentro e andiamo a controllare come stanno le cose. Basta con la testardaggine e l'orgoglio. Mi vedi? Sono un vecchio insegnante venuto da te con buone intenzioni. Un pellegrino convertito".
-Convertito?- Trigano sorride scettico. - Convertito a cosa?
- A te."
July 24, 2012
Un regista quasi a fine carriera accetta di partecipare ad una retrospettiva in Spagna sulla sua opera. Giunto sul luogo scopre però che solo i suoi primissimi film ne faranno parte, quelli nati dalla collaborazione con il suo storico sceneggiatore, nonché amico, prima che il loro rapporto e le loro carriere si dividessero bruscamente e definitivamente. Accompagnato da un’attrice che è stata donna e amante di entrambi, seppur in modi molto differenti, questo viaggio diventerà l’occasione per uno sguardo sul suo passato, i suoi errori e sul presente che gli rimane.
Se non straordinario è comunque un buon romanzo quest’ultimo di Yehoshua, certo non ai livelli de “Il signor Mani” (l’unico altro suo che ho letto), dall’ottima partenza e che se ha un difetto molto evidente, è quello purtroppo di perdere un po’ di smalto nella seconda parte, senza così riuscire a capitalizzare appieno quanto fino a lì costruito.
http://www.subliminalpop.com/?p=6026
Se non straordinario è comunque un buon romanzo quest’ultimo di Yehoshua, certo non ai livelli de “Il signor Mani” (l’unico altro suo che ho letto), dall’ottima partenza e che se ha un difetto molto evidente, è quello purtroppo di perdere un po’ di smalto nella seconda parte, senza così riuscire a capitalizzare appieno quanto fino a lì costruito.
http://www.subliminalpop.com/?p=6026
February 19, 2013
This is not the first book I read by Yehoshua, but still I think it is one of the most complex, I would have liked to know better Jewish stuff because I'm sure I missed more than one layers trough wich read the book. The story seemed easy enough at the beginning but then it gets complicated, still the writing was easy as was for me reading it. Not my first and surely not my last book by this author.
Questo non é il mio primo libro di Yehoshua, ma penso che sia comunque uno delle sue opere piú complesse, sono sicura che se avessi conosciuto meglio usi, costumi e tradizioni ebraiche avrei compreso ed identificato meglio alcuni dei livelli di lettura di questo romanzo, la cui scrittura resta comunque semplice, come la lettura, anche quando la trama si complica.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT FOR THE PREVIEW!
Questo non é il mio primo libro di Yehoshua, ma penso che sia comunque uno delle sue opere piú complesse, sono sicura che se avessi conosciuto meglio usi, costumi e tradizioni ebraiche avrei compreso ed identificato meglio alcuni dei livelli di lettura di questo romanzo, la cui scrittura resta comunque semplice, come la lettura, anche quando la trama si complica.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT FOR THE PREVIEW!
August 7, 2015
This is the second book of Yehoshua's I've read. I think I'm a fan. I'm not always sure what he's up to, and I kind of like that. I feel like there's always a hidden agenda that will develop over the course of the book and I'm willing to be patient to find out what it is. This book is about an Israeli filmmaker invited to Spain for a retrospective of his work, but while he's there, he suspects there is more to the trip than just some academics wanting to review his films. And of course, he's right. This book is about aging, the Spanish Inquisition, Israeli culture, exploitation in the name of art, family, and many other things.
January 1, 2014
This was a fun book to read. The book has been translated from Hebrew and the Jewish culture was evident in the characters' speech and actions. I liked the main character early on even though his weaknesses were evident and possibly because they made him seem so 'human.' I thought the symbolism might have been lost on me until 2 days after finishing it when the meaning of the final scene dawned on me. Overall and worthwhile read for something out of the norm, engaging and possibly full of symbolism for someone more sophisticated than me.
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