Book author: Zeruya Shalev

The Remains of Love by Zeruya Shalev

It is a real joy to pick up a book by an author I have so far admired and feel that admiration deepen. The Remains of Love is the second novel I’ve read by Zeruya Shalev, and though Love Life has a very different tone Shalev’s talent for transcribing the jumps and spirals of thought and emotion is eloquent and intense, as if you really are stepping into someone else’s mind. I find her writing intoxicating, such that it’s hard to tear myself from the page.

The Remains of Love follows the last year of Hemda’s life through her own and her children’s voices and, despite the lack of marked labelling, each voice is so distinct there is no confusion over who is speaking.

This last year of Hemda’s life is full of the emotional turmoil that terminal illness brings. Hemda and her children, Avner and Dina, re-evaluate their lives in the face of death: Hemda revisits her childhood and her decision to leave the kibbutz with her family; Avner confronts the difficulties of his marriage; Dina faces the menopause and a teenage daughter with a longing for intimacy.

It is easy to describe these plotlines in such a way as to make them banal. Even when you add in the problems of inter-familial relationships that exist in abundance between the three characters one could still approach this topic with a sentimental touch, but The Remains of Love is so much more. Longing and desire are not just about a need to love and be loved, to create bonds stronger than law, they stretch out into the politics of identity of the self as well as the state. The writing is sharp and bursting with all the vivid turns of consciousness.

I want to write more about what happens to Hemda and Avner and Dina. I want to share the beauty of Shalev’s family myth in which death and life spring from each other, and the brilliance in which nature and nurture are compared at all levels from leaves in the breeze, empty fishing nets and drained lakes, to children and adults locked in the chains of their upbringing by both parents and state. Were I to do this the unravelling of the plot would be spoiled so I merely promise you an engrossing and intelligent read.

For people who love writing to transport them into the minds of others, who want their experience challenged and expanded, who want to live through others’ eyes, this is your kind of book.

As I read The Remains of Love I felt myself returned to my adolescent self, reading the classics for the first time, indulging in an intensity of shared experience that left me with a kind of ecstatic mania. There are few writers capable of this combination of intellect and raw emotion that creates works whose beautiful shape and form carries emotional and philosophical punch. If I were part of the Nobel Prize literary team, I’d put Zeruya Shalev’s name on my list.

Next week I’m reading The Death House by Sarah Pinborough followed by Gospel Prism by Gerald Weaver. My Authors QH starts this week too. Watch out for updates.

Love Life by Zeruya Shalev

Love Life is a truly beautiful book: beautiful in its turn of phrase, in its intensity and beautiful in the way that people are beautiful – you stare and stare and then suddenly beauty breaks down into individual features and for one terrifying moment beauty is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen and you can’t look away.

Ya’ara is a young married woman trying to find a place for herself in the world. She is trying to understand her past – what role her dead brother played, how her parents’ relationship turned sour, who her parents are. She is trying to understand her choices and her desires, which are so readily fettered to others’ expectations. She is unhappy in her married life. She is unprepared to work for her university career. She dislikes her parents and her friends. She wanders around hungry for something that will help her change and she finds it in her parents’ old friend, Aryeh. Despite the age difference, despite his painful indifference, she debases herself for him, throwing her life at his feet all in order to discover more about Aryeh and his past with her parents and his past with his dying wife, and his every passing thought and movement in the present. Their relationship is suffocating in a completely opposite way to that of her relationship with her husband and ultimately that is what saves her and leads her love life to force her into loving life. Of course, she is also saved by the pages of an old book.

This love of narrative and the hidden meanings in old stories – much of which I need more time to understand because they are Jewish legends surrounding the fall of the temple – is another reason I loved this book. Truth is hidden in the interpretation of the stories others tell and the stories we tell ourselves. It’s hard to resist quoting the book, so here’s one:
‘This was apparently the root of love, to want to tell someone about every trifle that happened to you, in the hope that on the tortuous path from your mouth to his ear, the story would achieve its meaning, its justification, as if it had all happened simply so that I could tell it to Aryeh when he came to me at night, and not only it but every little thing that had ever happened, that was happening, that would happen in the future, this was their whole point, to tell them to Aryeh, even if Aryeh wasn’t in the least interested.’ (p181-182)

Whilst the description of intelligent Ya’ara being buffeted by the whirlwind of her relations with Aryeh is often extremely unpleasant, it is usually when it strikes some chord of familiarity – ‘I wondered to myself if this was harassment or pleasure’ (p199). There are moments when the dreadful things we sometimes think appear in black and white, unerased from the narrative of her life and they are both pleasing and horrifying because the intensity of her voice is hard to breathe especially when it holds up the dark mirror of mania. Perhaps, what I’m really saying is that, unlike Intuition by Allegra Goodman, Love Life is my kind of book and has an unpalatable quality that fascinates me.

I loved Love Life and would read it again. This is a bestseller you should buy and treasure.

I’m relieved I’ve managed to make the Christmas blog. Next week I’m reading The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr in what will be probably be a cold and windy New Year in Brittany.