From the late Israeli author (1916 - 2006), a novel short on plot
and character, long on the Awareness of Things; first published in
1992 and now translated into English.Herein fall the shadows of
Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Faulkner (As I Lay
Dying) and Woolf (The Waves), for, like those masters, Yizhar
(Midnight Convoy and Other Stories, 1969, etc.) is preoccupied with
the way the mind works, the way it apprehends objects and
experiences the world. Given such a preoccupation with subjective
states, it's not surprising that the novel subordinates setting and
plot to the contours of consciousness, and yet, over time, we
gradually become aware of characters and of the space they inhabit.
The novel consists of a series of long interior monologues,
beginning with a child's earliest memories of his father, a farmer
and "tiller of the soil," plowing a field in Palestine around the
year 1917. His meditations on connection to family and to the land
are interrupted by a vicious attack by wasps and by his father's
subsequent panicked attempts to get him medical attention. This
movement from philosophical introspection to personal crisis
provides the story's rhythm. We learn most of the story through a
series of concatenated monologues in which we move from the child's
initial terror to his awakening (and, to him, bewildering) sexual
awareness in early adolescence. A major theme involves the
narrator's growing sense of place and his concern with renewal of
the land. Early in life, he learns about despair: "This land is
given to desperate people . . . to truly desperate people. And they
all compete to see who is the most truly desperate," but his
ultimate epiphany is the sweet awareness that "everything here is
provisional . . . and you bathe your heart in the certainty that
everything will turn out well."Truly a novel that will claim your
heart. (Kirkus Reviews)
After a silence of almost 30 years since his "Stories of a Plain",
Yizhar reasserted his position as the greatest living master of
Hebrew prose with "Preliminaries". Strongly autobiographical,
"Preliminaries" progresses frame by frame, showing a boy growing up
in a Jewish farming community in Palestine and in the young city of
Tel Aviv between the years 1917 and 1930 - the boy's sensual
experience, his most primary, embryonic grasp of the world,
coalesces with the adult consciousness looking back, a kind of late
return to the innermost part of the child. His growing-up is linked
to the story of the land of Israel in the early days of Jewish
agricultural settlement: the longing to create a new Jew, the harsh
existence of the struggling community, the early clashes between
Jews and Arabs. Yizhar's pictures are rich in sensual power, laden
with scents and colours. But the real subject of "Preliminaries" is
a child's discovery, in confusion, wonder and terror, of the
concrete world around him. In resurrecting his childhood in the
land of Israel, Yizhar is carrying out a gentle stocktaking of the
renewed Jewish society.
General
Imprint: |
Toby Press Ltd
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Series: |
Hebrew Classics S. |
Release date: |
July 2010 |
First published: |
May 2007 |
Authors: |
S. Yizhar
|
Dimensions: |
210 x 140 x 52mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - With dust jacket
|
Pages: |
305 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-59264-190-1 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General & literary fiction >
Modern fiction
|
LSN: |
1-59264-190-3 |
Barcode: |
9781592641901 |
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