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The Confessions of Noa Weber
Acclaimed author Noa Weber has a successful “feminist” life: a strong career, a wonderful daughter she raised alone, and she is a recognized and respected cultural figure. Yet her interior life is bound by her obsessive love for one man—Alek, a Russian émigré and the father of her child, who has drifted in and out of her life. Trying to understand—as well as free herself from—this lifelong obsession, Noa turns her pen on herself, and with relentless honesty dissects her life. Against the evocative setting of turbulent, modernday Israel, this examination becomes a quest to transform irrational desire into a greater, transcendent understanding of love. The Confessions of Noa Weber introduces a startlingly talented writer in a rich tale that illuminates the desires, yearnings, and complexities of life in Israel.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Gail Hareven
21 books7 followersGail Haraven (Hebrew: גיל הראבן) is a writer from Israel. She is the author of six novels and three short story collections, as well as plays and nonfiction. She was awarded the prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature for The Confessions of Noa Weber, and currently lives in Jerusalem. The Confessions of Noa Weber is her first book translated into English.
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June 22, 2018
Let's say Noa Weber is suddenly sixty-eight. A bony body full of the opinions of a militant old lady, climbing tip-tap up those same old stairs. An old body full of opinions entering its old house, and lying down on the same old bed to give its feet a rest. And when this Noa Weber finally lies down, what exactly runs through her brain's worn-out connections? Does she polish up one of her correct opinions? Reflect compassionately about one of the victims in her books? Does she think about reforming society and justice for all? Definitely not. Just like now, Noa Weber thinks about him.
The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from Gail Hareven’s Hebrew original by Dalia Bilu, was the winner of the 2010 Best Translated Book Award from a very strong shortlist including The Discoverer, Ghosts, The Tanners, The Twin and The Weather Fifteen Years Ago.
The eponymous first person narrator is 47, a trained lawyer now active in a human rights NGO but also a commercially successful author, of escapist detective fiction. This book is ostensibly her non-fictional memoir.
Her story begins in October 1972, aged 17, when she met 28 year old Alex at a regular gathering of left wing political activists which took place at his flat, taken there by her 19 year old boyfriend Amikam. She immediately falls for Alek and moves into his flat.
Their relationship was, at least on Alek’s part, casual and uncommitted, but challenged by a fellow activist he agrees, rather spontaneously, to marry Noa purely to exempt her from military service. Her desire to avoid the military not stemming from fear, nor political ideology but partly from. a gradually burgeoning feminism, but most of all love.
The idea of serving in the army of occupation and oppression didn’t bother me particularly, what troubled me was the new awareness that the IDF was about to oppress me. ... It had no connection to ideology, or only a tenuous connection - my criticism of women’s service in the IDF developed years later - I only knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear it: I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Jerusalem, and I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Alek. Because I didn’t have an ounce of attention to invest in anything that wasn’t charged with my love.
To Alek the marriage is merely one on paper and in any case he, a recent immigrant to Israel and from an international background (his mother a Russian ethnic Jew but Christian convert), one very different to Noa’s own, plans to leave the country shortly to study in Germany:
This was something that was harder for me to understand - not only were we from different cultures, but he was the immigrant and I was the “WASP”. Not just a WASP, but a descendant of the “Mayflower” in Israeli terms, forty-eight on my father’s side, the pioneers of the early twenties on my mother’s.
But Noa falls pregnant and is disowned by her family. When she comes out of the hospital with her young baby daughter, Hagar, she finds Alek has actually accelerated his plans to leave for overseas (she finds some time later, to Paris not Heidelberg) although he has left her the long-term use of his flat where she proceeds to live for the following 30 years, years when, despite a number of short-term relationships, she remains passionately in love with Alek, who himself has children with another woman, seeing him on his occasional visits to Israel and visiting him a number of times in Moscow, but sometimes going years without contact.
This novel is her warts and all attempt to account for her lifelong obsession, her “dybbuk”, and move beyond Alek to a more transcendent understanding of love, and to escape the fate she sees for herself even in 20 years time (see the opening quote).
Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.
Her love focuses not on the physical Alek, who is absent, but on her memories:
What does it mean to love someone who isn’t there? If it weren’t for my highly developed memory, I would say that it is simply clinging to an idea, but the sensual memory that grew stronger as it dwelled on every scene was so vivid and detailed that on no account is it possible to speak of an idea, and in fact it often pierced me more sharply than reality itself.
But even though he is absent, in everything she does, I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.
And her daughter is, she admits, as much as she is a dutifully devoted mother, serves often solely as a medium for obtaining Alek’s love, such as when she sends her teenage daughter to visit her father in Paris.
The point is the despicable way I sometimes looked at her, through Alek’s imagined eyes ... I knew very well how loathsome these thoughts were, and nevertheless, before she set off for Paris, like a pimp I bought her a bottle of his favourite White Shoulders perfume, in the hope that in some unconscious way she might remind him of me.
Stylistically, from the outset Noa Weber eschews both local colour and also any neat presentation of her life:
It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere”, which in any case I have no desire to remember.
That said, Hereven very effectively weaves in the turbulent political developments of the 1972-2002 period in Israel into the background of the narration, and indeed, read during a visit to Tel Aviv, this was one of the book's strongest features for me.
Alek's first return from Paris is to help defend the country in the 1973 Yom Kippur conflict (in which Noa’s ex Amikam is killed on the Golan Heights), returning despite his political opposition to the treatment of the Palestinians, and he neatly skewer the anti-Zionism of his leftist Paris friends (with obvious resonance to the UK left today):
I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semitic and they just hate Israel.
Later in the book, and nearing his life’s end, Alek’s father emigrates from Russia to Israel, prompting this exchange amongst Noa’s parents;
My father said on the phone “... a person can go crazy with these characters who’ve decided to sign on as Zionist at this stage of the game.”
My mother intervened on the other phone and said “excuse me, that’s exactly what the State of Israel is for, so that anyone can remember whenever he likes.”
As mentioned, Noa is a successful author, the kickass heroine of her books (rather reminiscent of the later Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels) everything she isn’t. Sharing her human rights concerns, but taking very direct action to right wrongs, and loving and leaving her male conquests behind without a second thought:
My James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about. Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t.
But writing the novels allows Noa her one chance to escape:
My editor, who is more literary than I, once quoted me something Schiller is supposed to have said: All women writers write with one eye on the page and the other eye on a man, except for the Countess Von So-and-So who has one glass eye ...
With me it’s the complete opposite. I never wrote with one eye on Alek, I never attacked him, and with both eyes on the page I was actually free for a while of his imagined gaze.
The following passage sums up much of Noa’s approach to both this book and her contrasting detective thrillers:
The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of faux pas, because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick, the best thing about a good shtick is that like a hawker in the marketplace you can dish it out to people like a tasty morsel of yourself.
So I could sell you this wild shtick about how I got turned on by Alek, and how from the thing we had together I got pregnant, and how afterwards I got back into that whole scene again; and it’ll all be terribly flippant and witty, how I’ll laugh at her, and for a few moments perhaps I’ll even feel healed, because I’ll be really capable of laughing at “her,” who by then is already not completely me.
The truth is that emotional seriousness involves not a little stupidity. The stupidity lies in that toad-like inflation itself, as if vis-a-vis all the terribly painful and terribly important and terribly, terribly terrible things happening in the world, Noa Weber jumps up and croaks out loud: Listen, listen, look, look, I too have something terribly painful and terribly important to tell. Something about my tortured soul. Something about my delusions.
Nira Woolf, for example, would not make that mistake because my Nira is first of all a moral being, and it’s quite clear to her what is important and what is not. Fighting for the rights of disposed women, abused children, and so on, exposing the “system”, saving the innocent and stamping out evil - that’s important. But pining and whining about luuuve when your heart’s broken, all that’s just self-indulgence and nonsense as far as she’s concerned.
Noa's account is non-linear and, perhaps lacks any real sense of progress or greater understanding.
Overall though, certainly an interesting read - a powerful account of obsession and a fascinating indirect history of a secular Israeli during the 70d, 80s and 90s period, and while there may have been better books on a strong shortlist, still a worthy BTBA winner.
The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from Gail Hareven’s Hebrew original by Dalia Bilu, was the winner of the 2010 Best Translated Book Award from a very strong shortlist including The Discoverer, Ghosts, The Tanners, The Twin and The Weather Fifteen Years Ago.
The eponymous first person narrator is 47, a trained lawyer now active in a human rights NGO but also a commercially successful author, of escapist detective fiction. This book is ostensibly her non-fictional memoir.
Her story begins in October 1972, aged 17, when she met 28 year old Alex at a regular gathering of left wing political activists which took place at his flat, taken there by her 19 year old boyfriend Amikam. She immediately falls for Alek and moves into his flat.
Their relationship was, at least on Alek’s part, casual and uncommitted, but challenged by a fellow activist he agrees, rather spontaneously, to marry Noa purely to exempt her from military service. Her desire to avoid the military not stemming from fear, nor political ideology but partly from. a gradually burgeoning feminism, but most of all love.
The idea of serving in the army of occupation and oppression didn’t bother me particularly, what troubled me was the new awareness that the IDF was about to oppress me. ... It had no connection to ideology, or only a tenuous connection - my criticism of women’s service in the IDF developed years later - I only knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear it: I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Jerusalem, and I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Alek. Because I didn’t have an ounce of attention to invest in anything that wasn’t charged with my love.
To Alek the marriage is merely one on paper and in any case he, a recent immigrant to Israel and from an international background (his mother a Russian ethnic Jew but Christian convert), one very different to Noa’s own, plans to leave the country shortly to study in Germany:
This was something that was harder for me to understand - not only were we from different cultures, but he was the immigrant and I was the “WASP”. Not just a WASP, but a descendant of the “Mayflower” in Israeli terms, forty-eight on my father’s side, the pioneers of the early twenties on my mother’s.
But Noa falls pregnant and is disowned by her family. When she comes out of the hospital with her young baby daughter, Hagar, she finds Alek has actually accelerated his plans to leave for overseas (she finds some time later, to Paris not Heidelberg) although he has left her the long-term use of his flat where she proceeds to live for the following 30 years, years when, despite a number of short-term relationships, she remains passionately in love with Alek, who himself has children with another woman, seeing him on his occasional visits to Israel and visiting him a number of times in Moscow, but sometimes going years without contact.
This novel is her warts and all attempt to account for her lifelong obsession, her “dybbuk”, and move beyond Alek to a more transcendent understanding of love, and to escape the fate she sees for herself even in 20 years time (see the opening quote).
Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.
Her love focuses not on the physical Alek, who is absent, but on her memories:
What does it mean to love someone who isn’t there? If it weren’t for my highly developed memory, I would say that it is simply clinging to an idea, but the sensual memory that grew stronger as it dwelled on every scene was so vivid and detailed that on no account is it possible to speak of an idea, and in fact it often pierced me more sharply than reality itself.
But even though he is absent, in everything she does, I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.
And her daughter is, she admits, as much as she is a dutifully devoted mother, serves often solely as a medium for obtaining Alek’s love, such as when she sends her teenage daughter to visit her father in Paris.
The point is the despicable way I sometimes looked at her, through Alek’s imagined eyes ... I knew very well how loathsome these thoughts were, and nevertheless, before she set off for Paris, like a pimp I bought her a bottle of his favourite White Shoulders perfume, in the hope that in some unconscious way she might remind him of me.
Stylistically, from the outset Noa Weber eschews both local colour and also any neat presentation of her life:
It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere”, which in any case I have no desire to remember.
That said, Hereven very effectively weaves in the turbulent political developments of the 1972-2002 period in Israel into the background of the narration, and indeed, read during a visit to Tel Aviv, this was one of the book's strongest features for me.
Alek's first return from Paris is to help defend the country in the 1973 Yom Kippur conflict (in which Noa’s ex Amikam is killed on the Golan Heights), returning despite his political opposition to the treatment of the Palestinians, and he neatly skewer the anti-Zionism of his leftist Paris friends (with obvious resonance to the UK left today):
I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semitic and they just hate Israel.
Later in the book, and nearing his life’s end, Alek’s father emigrates from Russia to Israel, prompting this exchange amongst Noa’s parents;
My father said on the phone “... a person can go crazy with these characters who’ve decided to sign on as Zionist at this stage of the game.”
My mother intervened on the other phone and said “excuse me, that’s exactly what the State of Israel is for, so that anyone can remember whenever he likes.”
As mentioned, Noa is a successful author, the kickass heroine of her books (rather reminiscent of the later Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels) everything she isn’t. Sharing her human rights concerns, but taking very direct action to right wrongs, and loving and leaving her male conquests behind without a second thought:
My James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about. Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t.
But writing the novels allows Noa her one chance to escape:
My editor, who is more literary than I, once quoted me something Schiller is supposed to have said: All women writers write with one eye on the page and the other eye on a man, except for the Countess Von So-and-So who has one glass eye ...
With me it’s the complete opposite. I never wrote with one eye on Alek, I never attacked him, and with both eyes on the page I was actually free for a while of his imagined gaze.
The following passage sums up much of Noa’s approach to both this book and her contrasting detective thrillers:
The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of faux pas, because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick, the best thing about a good shtick is that like a hawker in the marketplace you can dish it out to people like a tasty morsel of yourself.
So I could sell you this wild shtick about how I got turned on by Alek, and how from the thing we had together I got pregnant, and how afterwards I got back into that whole scene again; and it’ll all be terribly flippant and witty, how I’ll laugh at her, and for a few moments perhaps I’ll even feel healed, because I’ll be really capable of laughing at “her,” who by then is already not completely me.
The truth is that emotional seriousness involves not a little stupidity. The stupidity lies in that toad-like inflation itself, as if vis-a-vis all the terribly painful and terribly important and terribly, terribly terrible things happening in the world, Noa Weber jumps up and croaks out loud: Listen, listen, look, look, I too have something terribly painful and terribly important to tell. Something about my tortured soul. Something about my delusions.
Nira Woolf, for example, would not make that mistake because my Nira is first of all a moral being, and it’s quite clear to her what is important and what is not. Fighting for the rights of disposed women, abused children, and so on, exposing the “system”, saving the innocent and stamping out evil - that’s important. But pining and whining about luuuve when your heart’s broken, all that’s just self-indulgence and nonsense as far as she’s concerned.
Noa's account is non-linear and, perhaps lacks any real sense of progress or greater understanding.
Overall though, certainly an interesting read - a powerful account of obsession and a fascinating indirect history of a secular Israeli during the 70d, 80s and 90s period, and while there may have been better books on a strong shortlist, still a worthy BTBA winner.
May 26, 2010
Noa Weber is a wealthy, single woman who late in life decides to write her memoirs. She’s been a single mother and a successful novelist, but her life is most marked by her obsession with a Russian Jew named Alek. Their relationship is filled with complications and at many times is completely one sided on her part: Alek has a full life without her. Noa’s life experience is more complex than most. Her attempt to recall her past motivations and experiences is problematic: “There’s a kind of lie in this linear writing which does not encompass all the details” she explains.
The novel reverses from her past to present in varying chunks, not always in chronological order. The events of her life are complicated by the social and political situation in Israel, and events in Russia as well. She is an atheist while her daughter is an observing Jew. Her mysterious relationship with her daughter is a sideline that adds to her complications and also makes the reader ask questions if this, in fact, is part of her “confession”.
The novel is beautifully written in an unanticipated way. She focuses only on relevant details to her story, so it proceeds at a quick clip that makes her seem self-absorbed. At times I found myself disliking Noa entirely, as she seemed so obsessively involved with Alek that she was completely heartless with everyone else, even to the point of neglect. She knows that too. His emotional and physical distancing from her doesn’t shake her: she is hooked: “Perhaps it is not him whom my soul loves that I am seeking, but simply my soul.” Yet her candor exposes more of her than might be shown if she presented herself as a more likable figure. In other words, her honesty is painful and risky. It’s as if she truly is in a confessional booth, stating her sins and but refusing absolution. And that dichotomy is what makes the novel so fascinating.
For example, she is remembering Alek and points to the weather as being the trigger for her memories: the smell of the rain, the warm wind, the “sight of the softened light refracted from the stone”. But she catches herself in her recounting, and in an aside, remarks “what did I just say? The warm wind and the softened light refracted from the stone in my longing? In the last analysis that’s romantic bullshit too. Setting the feeling in the ‘softened light of refracted from the stone’ to make it more photogenic. I loved Alek under the ugly neon of the hospital too, and in all kinds of other lights that can’t be poeticized.” She counters her memories in other reflections that alternate with humor and bitterness.
Thus the novel is unique and compelling because of Noa’s narrative voice. Never predictable and never easy, but worthy of the time and patience to find the truth between her memories and her reality.
This fiction novel was translated from Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
April 11, 2010
Noa Weber is a lady obsessed with her baby daddy. She's straight addicted to him, which may not be a new story, but this is the first time I've ever heard the story told from the point of view of a feminist Israeli woman.
Just as Noa contends with her identity as a feminist who's whipped, she also delves into the ironies and hypocrisies of Israeli identity, of a youth as a Commie, and of motherhood.
Noa's voice was difficult to get used to, but once you realize how self-effacing it is, she becomes really amusing. This book also achieves that really difficult quality of authenticity. It's a book that's the same size of life, with an honesty and sincerity that make it definitely worth reading.
Just as Noa contends with her identity as a feminist who's whipped, she also delves into the ironies and hypocrisies of Israeli identity, of a youth as a Commie, and of motherhood.
Noa's voice was difficult to get used to, but once you realize how self-effacing it is, she becomes really amusing. This book also achieves that really difficult quality of authenticity. It's a book that's the same size of life, with an honesty and sincerity that make it definitely worth reading.
March 15, 2013
Around the World in 52 Books: Israel
This award-winning translated novel by feminist author Gail Hareven of Israel is one that provoked a mixed and wide range of emotions in me.
Forty-seven year-old Noa Weber has spent 29 years actively, but secretly, consumed by obsessive "love" for a man who does not return her "love." I use the word love only because she did. At numerous points throughout the book I had to wonder if the character's "love" could more aptly be described as a powerful combination of lust, neediness and fantasy. This is something that does not seem to even remotely occur to her until the final pages of the book (and not very satisfyingly, I might add).
Some critics of the book cite the constrast of feminist plot threads authored by a feminist against the story of a woman obsessed over a man as hypocritical and repulsive. I can live with the inconsistencies of humans, the differences between ideals and our own personal quirks and failings, but what bothered me the most is that I have painfully encountered women like these. This myopic tale brought them to mind in vividly searing detail.
Who has not known a woman who is driven to dependence by a sense of her own incompleteness, subverting realities of a relationship to enable her fantasy of it? Who has not known a woman who is so consumed by such a relationship (or the idea of said relationship) that all other players in her life are reduced to small parts and are further distanced from her by the secrets and delusions she nurses? Who has not seen the isolation, wreckage and dysfunction that ensue, relatively unbeknownst to the woman herself?
Overall, the book's concept is a thought-provoking one and there are some beautiful moments in the story. That said, it is written in a scrambled-up, repetitive memoir sort of style that I found distracting. If the author implemented that style to help convey the disjointed, jarring, stagnant and distracting nature of obsession then she is brilliant.
I am glad that I read this book, but it is not one I would read a second time, and probably not one I would recommend to anyone except those who have an excessive amount of literary patience.
This award-winning translated novel by feminist author Gail Hareven of Israel is one that provoked a mixed and wide range of emotions in me.
Forty-seven year-old Noa Weber has spent 29 years actively, but secretly, consumed by obsessive "love" for a man who does not return her "love." I use the word love only because she did. At numerous points throughout the book I had to wonder if the character's "love" could more aptly be described as a powerful combination of lust, neediness and fantasy. This is something that does not seem to even remotely occur to her until the final pages of the book (and not very satisfyingly, I might add).
Some critics of the book cite the constrast of feminist plot threads authored by a feminist against the story of a woman obsessed over a man as hypocritical and repulsive. I can live with the inconsistencies of humans, the differences between ideals and our own personal quirks and failings, but what bothered me the most is that I have painfully encountered women like these. This myopic tale brought them to mind in vividly searing detail.
Who has not known a woman who is driven to dependence by a sense of her own incompleteness, subverting realities of a relationship to enable her fantasy of it? Who has not known a woman who is so consumed by such a relationship (or the idea of said relationship) that all other players in her life are reduced to small parts and are further distanced from her by the secrets and delusions she nurses? Who has not seen the isolation, wreckage and dysfunction that ensue, relatively unbeknownst to the woman herself?
Overall, the book's concept is a thought-provoking one and there are some beautiful moments in the story. That said, it is written in a scrambled-up, repetitive memoir sort of style that I found distracting. If the author implemented that style to help convey the disjointed, jarring, stagnant and distracting nature of obsession then she is brilliant.
I am glad that I read this book, but it is not one I would read a second time, and probably not one I would recommend to anyone except those who have an excessive amount of literary patience.
February 10, 2012
I finished this award-winning book overwhelmed with loathing and fury that its author is touted as a "feminist" writer. Essentially, it consists of a first-person monologue of an obsessive personality detailing over far too many excruciating pages her decades-long preoccupation with an absolutely contemptible love-interest. I found it impossible to separate the author from her character and find each unforgivable. That the character Noa Weber achieves career success and literary recognition in her own right makes her complete subjugation in her personal life no less offensive. In addition, the narrator's bright, sassy tone and compulsive need for sensationalist self-exposure made reading this book akin to experiencing successive blows to the head with a brick. I assume that there are Israeli women writers who are producing better work than this and will help to push this atrocity to the shadows where it belongs.
March 29, 2018
With careful strokes an outline is made as if it is a single thread, and then details are filled in with more or less urgency as that line keeps wanting to describe itself. Gail Hareven’s beginning sets a particular pace which mesmerizes yet awakens. Placement of people and objects are critical, yet non-judgmental, throughout this extraordinary depiction of the inner world of an all-encompassing love. Ultimately the aim would seem to be the transcendence of individual experience over the nullifying collective generalisation. Yet nihilism and anarchy are placed within this stream along with all the other ideologies possible for humans to squabble over, and a perspective is attained that perhaps each should somehow retain its own place.
Am I reading too much into these pages? “Should” may be too strong a word.
But with references across sexuality and pornography as well as high literature and modern crime novels there can be little doubt that everything is envisioned here in relation to everything – and ultimately therefore everyone – else.
With a kind of poetic diary structure, semi-titling rather than dating entries, the mesmerism makes parables of daily life events. “Once” occurs on page 324 instead of “in the beginning”, but at this very moment the raising of religious issues is transformed in a way that the very mundane Russian literary device at the beginning of the novel of naming by a single capital letter cannot subvert by its pretentious exclusion.
Irony is minimized by the immediate justification of such techniques by revelation of their deeper meanings. The seriousness of the human struggle, to both explain and divert from extreme seriousness, is held by this single thread of tension like a finely tuned musical instrument that would produce only silence should that string break. Personally I find this more rewarding than humour so overworked by other writers. It neither blackens nor dumps us in despair. The unfolding through a single stream avoids obsessive writing while presenting what others would consider obsessive content matter.
Distance allows view and movement where proximity would blind into inaction.
Many books are very obvious with their references to other artistic works. While there are obvious references here there are many that are less so. Confessions suggests Collette and Jean-Jacque Rousseau as well as Christian writers that may seem less relevant to Judaism. Capitalism and socialism as well as communism are introduced by living descriptions as much as through conversations sharing the bookshelves of various characters. There is a sense in which all ideologies are experiments, and yet the backdrop is very much of war zones rather than playgrounds in which they are carried out. This would make the title of confessions seem all the more valid.
Yet it is not a heavily analytical weighing of souls in a legalistic sense that is offered here. The intensity of constant contact with such weighty issues is individualised and breathed into. There is no need to take away another’s breath to be able to attain this.
The human importance of time, and more particularly how it is spent, is born out by the revelations layered like clothes in a suitcase. Any particular item may be worn in a number of settings, so to describe it requires the multiply combinations to fully appreciate its individuality. What is revealed and what presented thus also has layering of time and place folded into its fabric.
In June of 2015 I read The Silence and The Roar by Nihad Sirees, translated from Arabic. There are some parallels that may interest some readers, but personally I found that a harsh work and this one more patient, intricate and revealing. While this covers a generation’s lifetime in Israel, it does not fully bring us up to the current situation there. This distance is perhaps the most important for those not familiar with Israel personally but only through media interpretations.
There is no shortcut to understanding. There is no single image that reveals every person’s relationship to every other person. Taking the time to unpack the images and multiple references is a beginning to a longer journey. An important hinge is the reversed image of a marriage chosen against the grain of the social group in which it takes place. This unsettling detail becomes the ground around which the fault lines of the Middle East shift. It becomes a certainty around which the details of lives dance and rearrange. It becomes a fact by which to question your own sense of fact and reality. It becomes a new measure by which to measure your own experiences and interpretation.
Am I reading too much into these pages? “Should” may be too strong a word.
But with references across sexuality and pornography as well as high literature and modern crime novels there can be little doubt that everything is envisioned here in relation to everything – and ultimately therefore everyone – else.
With a kind of poetic diary structure, semi-titling rather than dating entries, the mesmerism makes parables of daily life events. “Once” occurs on page 324 instead of “in the beginning”, but at this very moment the raising of religious issues is transformed in a way that the very mundane Russian literary device at the beginning of the novel of naming by a single capital letter cannot subvert by its pretentious exclusion.
Irony is minimized by the immediate justification of such techniques by revelation of their deeper meanings. The seriousness of the human struggle, to both explain and divert from extreme seriousness, is held by this single thread of tension like a finely tuned musical instrument that would produce only silence should that string break. Personally I find this more rewarding than humour so overworked by other writers. It neither blackens nor dumps us in despair. The unfolding through a single stream avoids obsessive writing while presenting what others would consider obsessive content matter.
Distance allows view and movement where proximity would blind into inaction.
Many books are very obvious with their references to other artistic works. While there are obvious references here there are many that are less so. Confessions suggests Collette and Jean-Jacque Rousseau as well as Christian writers that may seem less relevant to Judaism. Capitalism and socialism as well as communism are introduced by living descriptions as much as through conversations sharing the bookshelves of various characters. There is a sense in which all ideologies are experiments, and yet the backdrop is very much of war zones rather than playgrounds in which they are carried out. This would make the title of confessions seem all the more valid.
Yet it is not a heavily analytical weighing of souls in a legalistic sense that is offered here. The intensity of constant contact with such weighty issues is individualised and breathed into. There is no need to take away another’s breath to be able to attain this.
The human importance of time, and more particularly how it is spent, is born out by the revelations layered like clothes in a suitcase. Any particular item may be worn in a number of settings, so to describe it requires the multiply combinations to fully appreciate its individuality. What is revealed and what presented thus also has layering of time and place folded into its fabric.
In June of 2015 I read The Silence and The Roar by Nihad Sirees, translated from Arabic. There are some parallels that may interest some readers, but personally I found that a harsh work and this one more patient, intricate and revealing. While this covers a generation’s lifetime in Israel, it does not fully bring us up to the current situation there. This distance is perhaps the most important for those not familiar with Israel personally but only through media interpretations.
There is no shortcut to understanding. There is no single image that reveals every person’s relationship to every other person. Taking the time to unpack the images and multiple references is a beginning to a longer journey. An important hinge is the reversed image of a marriage chosen against the grain of the social group in which it takes place. This unsettling detail becomes the ground around which the fault lines of the Middle East shift. It becomes a certainty around which the details of lives dance and rearrange. It becomes a fact by which to question your own sense of fact and reality. It becomes a new measure by which to measure your own experiences and interpretation.
January 25, 2017
Excellent book. I wanted to say that before I said anything else.
I have never read anything like this book before. I don't really know hoe to describe it. Yes it is a book about unrequited love, but it is not a love story. It is about the Noa Weber and how she grew into her life. Yes it was a tough life to start but never did I want to slap Noa and tell here to get on with her life. She is a strong character but not a strong woman you would want to emulate.
All I can say is read the book, you will not be disappointed.
I have never read anything like this book before. I don't really know hoe to describe it. Yes it is a book about unrequited love, but it is not a love story. It is about the Noa Weber and how she grew into her life. Yes it was a tough life to start but never did I want to slap Noa and tell here to get on with her life. She is a strong character but not a strong woman you would want to emulate.
All I can say is read the book, you will not be disappointed.
January 7, 2022
I probably would’ve enjoyed this book more if the story was told in a linear narrative, instead of jumping all over the place with digressions by the main character. The substance was interesting enough, but the execution—no chapters, just headings—was not to my liking.
January 20, 2020
This book was recommended by my Synagogue book club. It was a terrible book, no story, and a real struggle to finish. But for my Synagogue book club I would have quit after page 25
Read
January 21, 2020My Bet Shalom Synagogue book club is reading this book. I thought it was terrible and but for the book club selection, I would have quit reading after page 50.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 8, 2012
I have a love-hate affair with Overdrive. I love that I can borrow and return books without having to leave my bed. It’s got a pretty good selection – you should see my ‘wish list’ (where I’ve added books to read). But it also sucks – I can’t highlight passages, I can only bookmark pages. I know it’s a borrowed e-book but I would love to be able to highlight sections of the book to come back to later when I’m writing my review. But no…. just bookmarks, no highlighting, no note-taking.
So here I am stuck with many ‘bookmarks’ on the Overdrive e-book I’m blogging about, The Confessions of Noa Weber.
One of which was on page 10. And which I later realised was bookmarked for this passage:
“To confess to the finish… to confess till it finishes me off… to talk about him, to talk about myself, to talk so I won’t have to bear it any more. To talk until I can’t stand myself any longer. To talk, to talk, to talk myself to death – this is apparently why I’m standing here before you today.”
And that is essentially what The Confessions of Noa Weber is about. Noa Weber is 47 years old, a writer of crime novels (her protagonist is a very busty woman called Nira Woolf) in Israel. Her daughter is turning 29. And she has, for 30 years or so, been obsessively in love with Alek, whom she first met at a party as a teen and married to avoid being drafted.
It is an unrequited love:
“I loved him. And Alek wasn’t in love with me. And in spite of my youth, I did not give way to the temptation to interpret various gestures of his as possible manifestations of love. I did not count my steps to the refrain of ‘he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not…’. And even when I read between the lines – lovers will always read between the lines, they are never satisfied with the manifest content – I did not deceive myself by discovering signs of a feeling he did not possess. I loved him, and precisely for that reasons, I knew that he didn’t love me.”
This book could easily have sunken into some kind of weird deranged blog-style rant. Isn’t that what one immediately thinks of when it comes to obsessions? And this is some obsession. But Noa isn’t some pathetic lovelorn woman. Sure, as a young pregnant girl she was:
“What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered to pain for his sake.”
But the Noa Weber writing this ‘confession’ is more mature and self-aware, she is unfaltering in her need to confess. And she is also really dead on when it comes to her thoughts about love, young love, not-so-young love, unconditional love. It becomes quite philosophical, thoughtful.
However, I kept glancing at the bottom right corner of the Overdrive app, which tells me just how many pages are left. Because this isn’t the easiest book to read. It does get kind of annoying at times, so often I wanted to tell her, enough with Alek already. He’s not in love with you. He’s got other women, he’s even got other children by those women. But you know what? There’s no need. Because she knows all that already. She does. She is, after all, confessing all this to the reader. So I am guilty of skimming, a little on this page, a little on that. Because she gets a bit repetitive. So maybe I might have missed out on a few crucial emo bits, but sometimes skimming makes for a better book reading, because I can get on with it and move to another book.
So that’s my confession. I am a skimmer when the need arises. And in parts of this book, it did. But there is some part of me that understands Noa Weber and her unrequited love, I guess somewhere (perhaps buried deep inside) most of us, we would understand how she feels:
“There will never be a summer for us. Never in any summer will I walk with him along foreign streets, with their desperate squalor and their desperate splendor that I seem to know from some previous incarnation. And never will I experience again the consciousness of infinite expanses where everything seems pointless but love itself. Love will never expand me. The one right body will never come to me.”
So here I am stuck with many ‘bookmarks’ on the Overdrive e-book I’m blogging about, The Confessions of Noa Weber.
One of which was on page 10. And which I later realised was bookmarked for this passage:
“To confess to the finish… to confess till it finishes me off… to talk about him, to talk about myself, to talk so I won’t have to bear it any more. To talk until I can’t stand myself any longer. To talk, to talk, to talk myself to death – this is apparently why I’m standing here before you today.”
And that is essentially what The Confessions of Noa Weber is about. Noa Weber is 47 years old, a writer of crime novels (her protagonist is a very busty woman called Nira Woolf) in Israel. Her daughter is turning 29. And she has, for 30 years or so, been obsessively in love with Alek, whom she first met at a party as a teen and married to avoid being drafted.
It is an unrequited love:
“I loved him. And Alek wasn’t in love with me. And in spite of my youth, I did not give way to the temptation to interpret various gestures of his as possible manifestations of love. I did not count my steps to the refrain of ‘he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not…’. And even when I read between the lines – lovers will always read between the lines, they are never satisfied with the manifest content – I did not deceive myself by discovering signs of a feeling he did not possess. I loved him, and precisely for that reasons, I knew that he didn’t love me.”
This book could easily have sunken into some kind of weird deranged blog-style rant. Isn’t that what one immediately thinks of when it comes to obsessions? And this is some obsession. But Noa isn’t some pathetic lovelorn woman. Sure, as a young pregnant girl she was:
“What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered to pain for his sake.”
But the Noa Weber writing this ‘confession’ is more mature and self-aware, she is unfaltering in her need to confess. And she is also really dead on when it comes to her thoughts about love, young love, not-so-young love, unconditional love. It becomes quite philosophical, thoughtful.
However, I kept glancing at the bottom right corner of the Overdrive app, which tells me just how many pages are left. Because this isn’t the easiest book to read. It does get kind of annoying at times, so often I wanted to tell her, enough with Alek already. He’s not in love with you. He’s got other women, he’s even got other children by those women. But you know what? There’s no need. Because she knows all that already. She does. She is, after all, confessing all this to the reader. So I am guilty of skimming, a little on this page, a little on that. Because she gets a bit repetitive. So maybe I might have missed out on a few crucial emo bits, but sometimes skimming makes for a better book reading, because I can get on with it and move to another book.
So that’s my confession. I am a skimmer when the need arises. And in parts of this book, it did. But there is some part of me that understands Noa Weber and her unrequited love, I guess somewhere (perhaps buried deep inside) most of us, we would understand how she feels:
“There will never be a summer for us. Never in any summer will I walk with him along foreign streets, with their desperate squalor and their desperate splendor that I seem to know from some previous incarnation. And never will I experience again the consciousness of infinite expanses where everything seems pointless but love itself. Love will never expand me. The one right body will never come to me.”
February 24, 2016
This was good.
If that sounds dismissive then so be it – the book was well written, at times it was very well written, and (I can only assume as I don’t speak the original language) well translated – but I’m of the opinion that, for the most part, if I can summarize a book’s plot in three basic sentences and not leave anything of significance out, than I probably am not going to think very highly of the book, no matter how well written it might be. This likely speaks more of me as a reader, and my expectations as a reader – so be it. There are a lot of lofty ideas here, but the story itself comes across as thin.
That said, this book did read as a very European telling of a long-term affair (it is odd to describe it as an affair as the principal characters are married, but the term feels appropriate) – both in the structure of the relationship and in the narrator’s “enlightened” approach to sexuality – which does make this somewhat significant as it is in fact set in (and written in) Jerusalem.
Some of the background setting is fascinating – life in Jerusalem in the 1970’s, and some of the Russian settings in the 1980’s – and I wish more attention would have been paid to them.
All in, this was a good, quick read. At times it’s funny – in fact I wish more of the book would have been infused with the humor the author brings to the opening 30 pages – but for the most part it’s a simple (but well told) work about a relationship, but not much more.
If that sounds dismissive then so be it – the book was well written, at times it was very well written, and (I can only assume as I don’t speak the original language) well translated – but I’m of the opinion that, for the most part, if I can summarize a book’s plot in three basic sentences and not leave anything of significance out, than I probably am not going to think very highly of the book, no matter how well written it might be. This likely speaks more of me as a reader, and my expectations as a reader – so be it. There are a lot of lofty ideas here, but the story itself comes across as thin.
That said, this book did read as a very European telling of a long-term affair (it is odd to describe it as an affair as the principal characters are married, but the term feels appropriate) – both in the structure of the relationship and in the narrator’s “enlightened” approach to sexuality – which does make this somewhat significant as it is in fact set in (and written in) Jerusalem.
Some of the background setting is fascinating – life in Jerusalem in the 1970’s, and some of the Russian settings in the 1980’s – and I wish more attention would have been paid to them.
All in, this was a good, quick read. At times it’s funny – in fact I wish more of the book would have been infused with the humor the author brings to the opening 30 pages – but for the most part it’s a simple (but well told) work about a relationship, but not much more.
June 29, 2010
It's honest. And readable and interesting and I had a good time with it. 3 1/2 stars.
Noa is a contradiction. She's intellectual and analytical and practical about life and love and all that goes with it. But it spite of that, a phrase she uses often, she's completely taken over by the love and obsession and longing for one man. (She even wonders at one point if she can say anything new about longing. Apparently she can--300+ pages of it).
I kept thinking it's kind of an unremarkable story told in a not unremarkable way. The facts are that a woman loves a man who leaves her, never really loves her, but keeps her in his life on his terms. It's happened a million times. She makes those terms her own, justifies them. She knows she shouldn't but she gives in despite herself.
Some quotes:
"The problem isn't that he's unworthy, but that perhaps it isn't worthy to love anyone the way I love him."
"The paradox of love is that it enslaves you to one person, and by so doing liberates you from other things. It liberates you to the point of indifference, which increasingly seems to me to be true liberty."
Also an article/interview with the author: http://www.forward.com/articles/103319/
Amy Henry gave this to me and I passed it on to Rachel.
Noa is a contradiction. She's intellectual and analytical and practical about life and love and all that goes with it. But it spite of that, a phrase she uses often, she's completely taken over by the love and obsession and longing for one man. (She even wonders at one point if she can say anything new about longing. Apparently she can--300+ pages of it).
I kept thinking it's kind of an unremarkable story told in a not unremarkable way. The facts are that a woman loves a man who leaves her, never really loves her, but keeps her in his life on his terms. It's happened a million times. She makes those terms her own, justifies them. She knows she shouldn't but she gives in despite herself.
Some quotes:
"The problem isn't that he's unworthy, but that perhaps it isn't worthy to love anyone the way I love him."
"The paradox of love is that it enslaves you to one person, and by so doing liberates you from other things. It liberates you to the point of indifference, which increasingly seems to me to be true liberty."
Also an article/interview with the author: http://www.forward.com/articles/103319/
Amy Henry gave this to me and I passed it on to Rachel.
February 12, 2008
Acclaimed middle-aged writer Noa Weber—acclaimed both as a writer and as one of Israel’s leading feminists—has all the trappings of a successful “feminist” life: She has a strong career, a wonderful daughter she raised alone, and she’s a respected cultural figure. Yet her interior life is inextricably bound by her love for a man—Alek, a Russian émigré and the father of her child, who, over the years, has drifted in and out of her life.
Trying to understand—as well as free herself from—this lifelong obsession, Noa turns her pen upon herself, and with relentless honesty dissects her life. Against the evocative setting of turbulent, modern-day Israel, the examination becomes a quest—to transform the nature of her love from irrational desire to a greater, transcendent comprehension of the sublime.
The Confessions of Noa Weber introduces to the English-speaking world a startlingly talented writer in a rich tale that illuminates the desires, yearnings, and complexities of life in Israel, and of people trying to balance the needs of the secular world with the ultimate need and desire for transcendence.
Trying to understand—as well as free herself from—this lifelong obsession, Noa turns her pen upon herself, and with relentless honesty dissects her life. Against the evocative setting of turbulent, modern-day Israel, the examination becomes a quest—to transform the nature of her love from irrational desire to a greater, transcendent comprehension of the sublime.
The Confessions of Noa Weber introduces to the English-speaking world a startlingly talented writer in a rich tale that illuminates the desires, yearnings, and complexities of life in Israel, and of people trying to balance the needs of the secular world with the ultimate need and desire for transcendence.
April 21, 2010
3.5 stars. Noa has been obsessed with the same man for 30 years. How do I know she has a true addiction to Alek? Because when she talks about him, she sounds eerily similar to Heidi Fleiss talking about her drug addiction on "Celebrity Rehab." (One never knows where one's guilty TV pleasure will take one.)
Noa is full of contradictions. Even though her 30-year obsession is clearly not healthy, she doesn't come across as a victim. Her addiction seems both out of her control and a conscious choice. For her, is it better to have a few transcendent moments rather than a lifetime of stable commitment? Or does she need major therapy?
As is typical of many of my Idlewild reads, I didn't particularly enjoy the process of reading this, but I was left with lots to think about.
I love this line about waiting: "Waiting, like concealed internal bleeding, gradually brings about a kind of anemia, a completely tangible loss of strength."
Noa is full of contradictions. Even though her 30-year obsession is clearly not healthy, she doesn't come across as a victim. Her addiction seems both out of her control and a conscious choice. For her, is it better to have a few transcendent moments rather than a lifetime of stable commitment? Or does she need major therapy?
As is typical of many of my Idlewild reads, I didn't particularly enjoy the process of reading this, but I was left with lots to think about.
I love this line about waiting: "Waiting, like concealed internal bleeding, gradually brings about a kind of anemia, a completely tangible loss of strength."
February 20, 2010
Noa Weber is a successful Israeli author of crime thrillers that feature a female-lawyer version of James Bond, Nira Woolf. Now, however, she is sitting down to write a confession of her all-consuming unrequited love for Alek, which has ruled her life.
This is the first book translated into English by Israeli author Gail Hareven. Hareven certainly has a way with words, although credit should also go to her translator, Dalya Bilu. The writing in this book pulled me in from the first page, and it was a pleasure to read. The writing should be savored, and a couple of times I had to put the book down because it was late at night and I knew I was too tired to really appreciate the prose.
You can read my full review at Rantings of a Bookworm Couch Potato.
This is the first book translated into English by Israeli author Gail Hareven. Hareven certainly has a way with words, although credit should also go to her translator, Dalya Bilu. The writing in this book pulled me in from the first page, and it was a pleasure to read. The writing should be savored, and a couple of times I had to put the book down because it was late at night and I knew I was too tired to really appreciate the prose.
You can read my full review at Rantings of a Bookworm Couch Potato.
September 18, 2012
Fremevo dalla curiosità di leggere Le confessioni di Noa Weber senza sapere bene perché. Forse perché mi sono resa conto di non poter sempre leggere autori maschi. Forse perché non vedevo l’ora di leggere un ebook de La Giuntina. Forse perché speravo, non invano, di ritrovare un’eco della scrittura onesta e limpida di Shulim Vogelman, che ha tradotto il libro. Forse perché mi attirava la copertina, con queste splendide labbra leggermente imbronciate colorate di verde.
Ad ogni modo, non a torto fremevo dalla voglia di leggerlo. E adesso che ho digitalmente chiuso l’ultima pagina mi manca l’irruenza, la rabbia, l’emancipazione e la sincerità di Noa.
[...]
da La Pantofola Digitale
Ad ogni modo, non a torto fremevo dalla voglia di leggerlo. E adesso che ho digitalmente chiuso l’ultima pagina mi manca l’irruenza, la rabbia, l’emancipazione e la sincerità di Noa.
[...]
da La Pantofola Digitale
October 15, 2013
This story about Moa Weber os about a liberal who lives in Israel, Basically it 's abou Noa, Alex, her husband and lover. She is fixated on him toe degree to adegree. They
are married but he doen''t love her but respects her. He is a traveler that's in and out of her bed while trafeling around Europe while sleeping with other women and having children, He has a daughter, Hagur,. who he not attched to nor does he ignore her. .
Noa is a bright women, lawyer, and a famous author. Is love blind?
Merged review:
Abright women who falls in love with Alex, who does not love her, fathers her child?, as well as others.Noa is bright, dynamic, love her daughter Hagar , Noa is fixeated on love for Alex. He acknowledges her from time to time. In Israel.
are married but he doen''t love her but respects her. He is a traveler that's in and out of her bed while trafeling around Europe while sleeping with other women and having children, He has a daughter, Hagur,. who he not attched to nor does he ignore her. .
Noa is a bright women, lawyer, and a famous author. Is love blind?
Merged review:
Abright women who falls in love with Alex, who does not love her, fathers her child?, as well as others.Noa is bright, dynamic, love her daughter Hagar , Noa is fixeated on love for Alex. He acknowledges her from time to time. In Israel.
tasted
May 26, 2016This novel has many of the virtues, and lacks thereof, of Hareven's Lies, First Person, but the balance this time was not quite right for me. The voice was every bit as excellent (and well-translated — even less annoying), but the novel’s structure didn’t work as well for me, which let the content pour through (and the content interested me less). Unlike Lies, therefore, I was less and less caught up in the narrator’s singular mind. A third of the way through, I decided to move on. But others, especially many women, might find the balance works differently for them and even prefer this novel.
March 14, 2012
Perhaps the best thing I've read about obsessive love, if only because Noa Weber's love for Alek is not just felt, it is thought and understood, the obsession acknowledged and weaved deliberately into the fabric of her life rather than dismissed or reviled or 'worked on' in some way. For every moment where Noa looks pathetic for loving so undeserving a man as Alek with such blind intensity, there are a dozen that make her look triumphant and wise.
Hareven rambles a bit, and the book has a tendency to slide too far into the abstract for too long, but for all that a remarkable achievement.
Hareven rambles a bit, and the book has a tendency to slide too far into the abstract for too long, but for all that a remarkable achievement.
February 24, 2015
This seemed to be a story from beginning to end that deals with the question of love - a young girl falls for a somewhat older man, has a child, married for less than romantic reasons. She seems to know from the beginning that he doesn't love her yet she spends all of the rest of her life is a relationship of sorts with him and this love is the be all and end all for her. Sadly, I did find the sentiment familiar and with a disturbing ring of truth.
March 24, 2016
I'm of two minds with this book- I enjoyed the writing style and the setting of the story thus the 4th star); but had a hard time respecting Noa and the unbelievable obsession she had with Alek. I got it when she was an adolescent girl- not so much when she was a mature and accomplished woman. I kind of lost interest(respect) for her in the last quarter of the book- but was mostly intrigued prior to that- hoping she would come to her senses.
January 26, 2017
It's wrong to analyze this book by it's story line, which there is hardly any to speak of and where some readers have based their review on. The main character is tortured and all the while not able to forgive herself for her behavior. She takes on a persona of trying to be normal to the outside world, always covering up her inner war between logic and emotion. Sad, yet painfully honest and compelling.
February 7, 2011
I heard about this one on NPR's book segment, and instantly wanted to read it. I wasn't disappointed, and had to keep reminding myself that it was a translation, because at times the language was so precise and evocative that I marveled at what it must be like to read it in its original Hebrew. This book will move you.
Re-read February 2011.
Re-read February 2011.
December 14, 2009
Beautiful and compelling book about a woman's obsession with a man. Hareven enables the reader to see how one can live in two selves--one which behaves and the other which sees and judges the behavior. The narrator's story is a great example about how our lives are often shaped positively by seemingly negative events or behaviors. The book shows the complexity of human emotion and behavior.
September 19, 2010
Portrait of a/the female writer as a possessed individual.
NOT to be read in one sitting!
Possessed = lovesick and love tortured, self-involved and self-loathing, naive and serious.
I disagree though with the author's "prescription" that contempt whether from others or the self can help in such cases. If it did, many therapists would be out of business.
NOT to be read in one sitting!
Possessed = lovesick and love tortured, self-involved and self-loathing, naive and serious.
I disagree though with the author's "prescription" that contempt whether from others or the self can help in such cases. If it did, many therapists would be out of business.
October 11, 2012
This book makes a good pair with The Bad Girl, by Vargas Llosa: Obsessive loves fragmented across recent history, one of a man for a woman, and this book of a woman for a man. I might have given The Bad Girl 5 stars because the male perspective touches me closer to my heart, but they are both very good books.
April 22, 2009
This might be the best thing I've read it years!!! I think I will make it (and me) sound dumb if I try to elaborate. This is the only book by Gail Hareven (an Israeli author) that's been translated into English, and you should all read it.
Read
June 16, 2010Terrific book. Was so glad to see it win an award for Best Translated Fiction this year. See my early take on it here/
March 12, 2015
Yes, you do understand the obsession and get drawn into it, and even maybe understand that this kind of love is built on very little so there won't be anything to report other that the diffuse and ethereal, but the book kind of dragged.
Enjoyed the Israeli details.
Enjoyed the Israeli details.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews