Love
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation
An incendiary tale of sex work from a young literary provocateur
Love is a fever dream of a novel about a young sex worker whose life blurs the boundaries between violence and intimacy, objectification and real love. Startlingly vulnerable and lyrically deft, Maayan Eitan’s debut follows Libby as she goes about her work in a nameless Israeli city, riding in cars, seeing clients, meeting and befriending other sex workers and pimps. In prose as crystalline as it is unflinching, Eitan brings us into the mind of her fierce protagonist, as Libby spins a series of fictions to tell herself, and others, in order to negotiate her life under the gaze of men. After long nights of slipping in and out of the beds of strangers, in a shocking moment of violence, she seizes control of her narrative and then labors to construct a life that resembles normalcy. But as she pursues love, it continually eludes her. She discovers that her past nights in cheap hotel rooms eerily resemble the more conventional life she’s trying to forge.
A literary sensation in Israel, Maayan Eitan’s debut set off a firestorm about the relationship between truth and fiction, and the experiences of women under the power of men. Compact and gemlike, this is a contemporary allegory of a young woman on the verge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sex work and the effects of trauma on memory are interwoven in Eitan's mysterious and phantasmagorical debut, translated by the author from the Hebrew. A narrator whose name might be Libby or Justine (a nod to Sade) describes her hazy life in contemporary Israel, where sex workers of various ages and ethnicities are ferried to and from assignations by drivers, and the bonds they form with one other. The narrator refers obliquely to therapy, hospitalization, self-loathing, acts of violence, and habits of theft and self-harm, offering conflicting accounts of her age, personal history, and reasons for doing sex work. Some stability exists in the figure of Assaf, her boss, and her repeated references to a childhood spent living off-the-grid. The end of a relationship sends the narrator reeling, and she begins facing a childhood tragedy. Proceeding in short, self-contained sections, the deliberately opaque narrative is equally frustrating and enticing. The psychological mystery at the heart—why does the narrator do sex work?—is not particularly surprising or original, but Eitan is less interested in redemption than the possibilities for reflecting a fractured consciousness in prose (the narrator imagines reading in a book that "we are free women"). Some of this is baffling, but it has its moments.
