Scenes from Village Life
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A teenage son shoots himself under his parents' bed. They sleep that night unaware he is lying dead beneath them.
A stranger turns up at a man's door to persude him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house.
An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night.
As each story unfolds, Amos Oz, builds a portrait of a village in Israel. It is a surreal and unsettling place. Each villager is searching for something, and behind each episode is another, hidden story. In this powerful, hynotic work Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives and gives us a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence.
By the winner of the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize, previous winners of which include Philip Roth, Ivan Klima, Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter and John Banville.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's something rotten in Tel Ilan, Israel, and in each of these eight finely wrought pieces of Oz's novel-in-stories, he skillfully delineates the looming forces threatening to fissure the serenity of this idyllic village. Founded 100 years before, the "pioneer village" has changed from a farming community of vineyards and almond trees into a place of boutiques and art galleries. In the first story, "Heirs," a stranger appears at the home of Arieh Zelnik claiming to be a relative who wants to convert the family land into a "health farm" for paying customers; while in "Singing," a Friday night communal choral group intent on the Sabbath is oblivious to the rumble of air force planes returning from bombing "enemy targets." Most chilling is "Digging," in which a young Arab student writing a book comparing Jewish and Arab village life comes to stay in a back shed belonging to the widow Rachel Franco, whose aged, bitter father, a former Member of the Knesset, becomes obsessed with digging sounds he hears at night. Is the Arab digging for some proof that the land really belongs to him? wonders the old man, who mourns the days when "there was still some fleeting affection between people." Oz (Rhyming Life and Death) writes characterizations that are subtle but surgically precise, rendering this work a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience.
