Maror
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land (2013), a must-read for the liberal bourgeoisie both in and outside Israel, was another. Photograph: Sayan Mondal/Getty Images/EyeEm View image in fullscreen Tidhar maps out an amoral Tel Aviv where greed outweighs ideology. It's a harrowing passage, another trial for the young Avi, and a harbinger of the events later that year.
In 1995 the young Avi finds his own summer of love as a small-time ecstasy dealer at a music festival in the Negev desert, as Yitzhak Rabin prepares to sign the Oslo peace accord.
It’s subtly done and that’s no mean feat when dealing with such a complex subject as Israel, particularly in the period covered by the book. Which, without being overdone, give a real sense of a world and a life that are the same in many respects as the Anglosphere. Tidhar has created a cast of fascinating characters that tell their own individual stories, which are carefully crafted to interconnect with each another.
I believe the novel was originally written in English (though it may have been translated from the Hebrew) but it assumes substantial familiarity with Israeli popular culture.We open in the early 21st century on Cohen, a cop so bad even Vic Mackie would do a sharp intake of breath, then flash back to the seventies, and gradually see how the fresh-faced young investigator ended up like that. Gripping, dynamic, page-turning and also enlightening, this has a distinct atmosphere and style of its own. If I was Tidhar I would be having words with the publisher because it makes parts of the novel unreadable.
An Israeli recommended this to me because I am at work as well on a non-linear novel across decades that confronts the nature of the Jewish gangster. So many aspects of Maror attract superlatives but they fail to convey the range and breathtaking insight of this epic crime novel. It's hard for me to judge what impact it will have on those who've no familiarity with this topic at all.Not every gesture works; each chapter opens with a quote, usually from within itself, but when the chapters aren't long this mainly serves to get a bit 'do you see?
The threads that hold the whole thing together are crime, corruption, and violence against women, and the easy brutality reminded me a bit of James Ellroy though the style and voice is different. Radiant with all the brutally elegant atmosphere of crime noir, and the richly nuanced complexity and style of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, it’s a genre-busting novel that will catch your breath … At once illuminating, thrilling and thought-provoking, this tale of corruption, killings, sacrifice and the souls that make up a nation is a symphonic feat of fiction. While Cohen is only glancingly present, other characters in his sphere are more deeply involved, in particular Benny. Ellroy’s fundamental insight into American culture – and I respect it as at the heart of one of the major oeuvres of contemporary American literature – is that our ‘American dream’ is built on a foundation of lies, deceit, and cruelty that we have papered over with happy stories.But with Cohen it's a little different - he's a cop who's deeply tied in with the criminal underworld, but every act he takes or influences is utterly deliberate. Otherwise, this is a novel that I think I will reread in the future, in fact I think I'd possibly get more out of it then, now that my knowledge of Israel's recent history has been improved somewhat! it's certainly a compelling read, although be warned it has a slightly non-traditional narrative structure, which did work well for the story that was being told but occasionally annoyed me. Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist. The meaning of the Hebrew word 'maror' is bitter herbs, and the title encapsulates the book perfectly.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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