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Hebrew Fiction / Dueling narratives
By Ruth Margalit
Tags: Amos Oz, Israel News

Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz (translated from the Hebrew, "Haruzei Hahayim Vehamavet," by Nicholas de Lange) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 117 pages, $23

"It is as though he were picking their pockets," Amoz Oz writes about the nameless Author as his protagonist stares at different audience members during a reading of his latest book, while conjuring up stories to suit each of their faces. And, in a sense, this is what Oz himself is doing: picking his readers' pockets, or minds, as if he were waiting to see how we react to "Rhyming Life and Death," his 2007 novella, newly translated into English.

This is because "Rhyming Life and Death" is unlike any of Oz's previous books. It takes place in the space of just eight hours, as the Author strolls through the humid streets of Tel Aviv on the eve of his book reading, introducing us to a range of characters - all of whom exist only in the realm of the Author's creative consciousness. It is a book about the creation of competing narratives; namely, it is metafiction - a book about the writing of books.
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Arriving early for the "monthly meeting of the Good Book Club at the refurbished Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack Cultural Centre" in Tel Aviv, the Author sits down in a nearby cafe and is consumed with a familiar anxiety about the kind of questions he will likely be expected to answer throughout the event: "Why do you write? Why do you write the way you do? Are you trying to influence your readers, and if so, how?" Pretty soon, though, his mind is distracted by a tired-looking waitress in a short skirt. From then on, Oz allows his readers access into the Author's imagination as he creates the waitress' narrative, as well as those of every other person he encounters that evening.

The waitress' name is Ricky, the Author decides, and her first love was Charlie, the reserve goalkeeper of the Bnei Yehuda soccer team who, after spending a steamy weekend with Ricky in Eilat, left her for another woman. There is a slight asymmetry in Ricky's hips, the Author notices, and this asymmetry will come back to distract and arouse him several times throughout the evening, for, as he testifies, "He wrote more or less the same way he dreamed or masturbated: a mixture of compulsion, enthusiasm, despair, disgust, and wretchedness."

The Author's emphasis on physicality and his almost obsessive observational abilities are, in fact, precisely what make him "The Author." Writing, for him, is not liberating - it is inescapable. And nowhere is this more accentuated than in the duel-like scene between the literary critic whose job is to present the author to the audience and who peppers his interpretation of the Author's work with grandiose terms such as "narrative authority," "inter-textual context" and "the actual meaning of the term 'meaning,'" while our miserable Author, in his response, finds himself piling "lie upon lie." He doesn't care about device or technique. In fact, all he can think of are details like the "vein-lined legs" of a woman in the audience he decides has embarked on an affair with an aspiring young poet, the pimply teenaged boy now sitting behind her, and the "slightly shriveled" man in the back row, whom he casts as a low-ranking social activist he names Arnold Bartok.

Pulling the rug out

Observation is the very essence of writing, Oz is telling us. Nothing else matters. Interesting, then, that he chooses self-conscious metafiction in order to do so. After all, there is something unsettling, even exasperating, about this genre, in which the writer seems to be pulling the rug from under your feet just as you are getting into the plot, almost mocking you for falling prey to his literary exercise.

Oz himself anticipated the frustration the reader might sense upon finishing his book. In an interview with Haaretz (published in Hebrew in March 2007), he confessed he was afraid his readers would "want their dish already cooked, and instead I'm inviting them to the kitchen." But what a kitchen it is.

The character list that appears as an appendix at the end of the book attests to the richness and breadth of this short novella: It includes more than 30 names, each with its own eccentricities, and each awarded a specific Ozian trademark, such as Uncle Osya, a "piano tuner. House painter. Once, many years ago, forgot the Author (who was still a child at the time) at the Pogrebinsky Brothers' pharmacy. Some say that for a year or two he hid the niece of Leon Trotsky in his basement apartment on Brenner Street." This dry and semi-humoristic tone, coupled with an endless degree of compassion, makes each of the characters memorable, despite their ambiguous status as existing only in relation to the Author.

As the story progresses, the boundaries between what happened and what could have happened become increasingly blurred, so that by the time we reach the amazingly candid and detailed sex scene between the confident and mature Author and Rochele Reznik, a timid young woman who serves as the professional excerpt reader at his book event, we find ourselves as baffled by the situation as the couple themselves. Didn't he just decide not to come up to her apartment? Is he imagining this? Does Rochele even exist, or is she a metaphor of some sort?

Be that as it may, this love scene - which Oz described as the longest such scene he had ever written - is like a lesson in the art of storytelling in and of itself. He depicts with detail and sensitivity every small embarrassment, hesitation and anxiety, as well as the constant attraction-repulsion dynamic between the two unlikely lovers until they finally get into bed. "And because the bed is so narrow they have to go on lying on their sides holding each other tight and they somehow have to coordinate each move, like a pas de deux," he writes. "And apart from a single meeting between an elbow and a shoulder the dance is perfectly fluid."

Deserted by desire

However, at the moment of truth, the Author's desire deserts him, as one by one, his fictional characters come back to haunt him, stripping him of his manhood. The Author's tiresome literary critic would likely argue that writing is therefore portrayed as a castrating act, even as a sort of curse. But, perhaps, there is also an acknowledgment here of the boundaries of writing, in the form of Oz's almost apologetic disclaimer to his characters, as well as to his readers: "If only he could say to her, Listen, Rochele, please don't be sad, after all, the characters in this book are all just the Author himself ... and whatever happens to them here is really only happening to him, and even you, Rochele, are just a thought in my mind and whatever is happening to you and me is actually only happening to me."

This direct address to the reader elucidates Oz's literary goal in "Rhyming Life and Death." His wish, it would seem, is to shed himself of such cultural mediators as literary critics in order to reach his readers in an unconstrained manner. Oz strives to become what the Romantic philosopher Schiller called the Naive Poet - natural and spontaneous - as opposed to the self-conscious Sentimental Poet. Yet by choosing metafiction as genre, Oz undermines this very goal.

Through his technique of "solitary dialogues," as he describes the Author's method of mentally cataloguing everything he sees, "Rhyming Life and Death" becomes Oz's ars poetica, a highly self-reflective work in which he examines the art of writing and its purpose. At the end of the book he seems to have reached his conclusion. "Once in a while it is worth turning on the light to clarify what is going on." Oz skillfully manages to do just that. Still, there will be those who just want to read some fiction. In the dark.

Ruth Margalit, a frequent contributor to Books, is a foreign news desk editor at Channel 10 TV
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