Fiction: The new book from Israeli writer David Grossman, Lovers and Strangers, could as easily be called need and regret. This pair of dramatic novellas are tough fictions, elegant and near virtuoso in the exactness of the sensuous, physical prose but relentless in their pursuit of emotional truth.
It does not surprise that Grossman, author of The Yellow Wind (1987), is a writer of overwhelming honesty. Just as his political commentaries and journalism are fired by passion, his fiction is lively, intense and unafraid of tackling the most raw corners of a psyche.
In the first of these narratives, Frenzy, a husband confronts the reality of his wife's long-time affair. He examines this relationship, which may or may not be actually happening, with an elaborate amount of intimate detail.
Almost lovingly he describes the brief moments, barely an hour, which his wife has carefully set aside each day for meeting her lover, a man whose very existence is pitched to those moments.
Far more frightening than a show of furious jealousy, is the despairing acceptance of the husband who knows the unspoken and merely waits. He loves his wife and has retained a sense of wonder in his dealings with her. As for the wife, she appears to love both men in different ways and this large, generous, highly female woman, certainly appears to cherish herself. Each year she sets off for four days of peace to be spent on her own, free of her dependent suitors.
The intensity of the emotional turmoil is almost oppressive and interestingly, well sustained throughout less by sympathy for the players than by the force of the writing. Grossman has been well served by a translator who has rendered every nuance with convincing clarity.
Shaul, the betrayed husband, is clever and noted for his aloof manner. Not one to confide easily in anyone, he bears his sorrows like a cross. But on being injured in an accident, he becomes dependent. His brother is due to drive him on a long-distance car journey. An emergency intervenes and the brother's wife, Shaul's sister-in-law, deputises as the driver. Esti and Shaul barely know each other. She is a natural carer, a woman whose relevance has always been contained within her capacity to help. They begin to talk more easily than either would have expected, or rather she listens. She also becomes his confidante as Shaul begins to tell the story of a stranger's marital grief which he quickly admits to being his own.
Grossman is exploring difficult territory. At any moment, his narrative could falter into the voyeuristic and an even greater risk is the reader's loss of sympathy for, and lack of interest in the couple. Yet the narrative succeeds through the subtle characterisation of Esti, the sister-in-law, who had joined the family years before despite the opposition of her reluctant mother-in-law. Time, duty and the bearing of five children has however earned her a place, and with it, status, approval and her mother-in-law's affection within the family circle.
In painting a portrait of a woman who has always proved her worth not through being beautiful, but by being useful, Grossman has created a character well aware that little attention has ever been expended on assessing her thoughts or secrets. But Esti, reliable, wry and shrewd, has secrets of her own.
Initially, Esti hopes that her brother-in-law will fall asleep. Her interest grows and with it, an ability to explore her own past. A caring mother and a good wife to a husband who relies on her, when listening to Shaul's grief, she recalls her own experience of love.
The more she listens to Shaul, the more she remembers the obsessive love she once had for a man who left her. It makes for an edgy, compelling story.
Grossman's evolution as a writer has moved through various phases since he emerged as an international figure on the publication of his second novel, See Under: Love (1989). The English language version the following year saw him being compared with Grass and Marquez. It was an ambitious work looking to the Holocaust and the life of Polish writer Bruno Schulz. Grossman was seen as the heir apparent to Amos Oz. Both writers have always commented on the politics of their country. It is true that there was much polemical intent in Grossman's earlier fiction but he has become increasingly drawn to the politics of intimacy.
The Zig Zag Kid (1997) and Someone to Run With (2003) are both variations on the theme of street life as experienced by children. Someone to Run With, although written for teenage readers, is the darker, as a boy sets out to help a young girl singer whose brother is a drug addict. The polemic is still there, albiet more in a cautionary sense.
Her Body Knows, the second of the two novellas, is a daughter's response to returning to her often estranged and now dying mother, a former yoga teacher. The ambivalence undercutting their relationship seethes throughout the piece. The daughter, now a writer, has ghosts of her own, but has decided to address her feelings about her mother, by writing a story, also about a female yoga teacher.
She reads this to the dying woman. Central to this fiction within a fiction is the mother figure's encounter with a young boy whose father had approached her asking for yoga lessons and/or possible sexual initiation for the boy. The daughter's version of the yoga teacher is uncompromising.
As with the earlier piece, Grossman sustains his narrative through the virtuosos writing. He takes no sides, there is no easy resolution. The daughter, the narrator, proves the sum of the part of a childhood spent largely at war with her mother. It is a shocking, strange and unnervingly passionate study of regret. Late on the daughter is conscious of her mother having become a presence who is no longer a being. It is an eloquent study of a life folding.
It is difficult to imagine any child, or writer, reading such a quasi-erotic story to the subject who inspired it. This is secondary to the real story, that of a daughter finally confronting her multiple resentments and with them, a lifetime's regret.
Neither of these works are complacent entertainments. David Grossman, by drawing on the ambivalent elememnt in relationships, both sexual and filial, brings the same force of unsettling emotional truth to the intimate as he has done to the political.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Lovers and Strangers by David Grossman translated by Jessica Cohen Bloomsbury, 264pp. 14.99