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BLISS

Name: BLISS
Author: Ronit Matalon
ISBN: 0-8050-6602-0

by Ronit Matalon & translated by Jessica Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 2003

Imperfect and mis-titled yet incisive, Bliss provides a colloquial glimpse at the Israeli social fabric.

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A circuitous second novel by Israeli author Matalon (The One Facing Us, 1998), told in flashbacks, follows a soured friendship between two Tel Aviv women during the years of intifada.

Past and present events dart in and out of this many-faceted, frequently ambiguous narrative: By the time narrator Ofra and her best friend from childhood, Sarah, bid goodbye at the Tel Aviv airport (Ofra is boarding her flight to France, where she’ll attend the funeral of her AIDS-stricken cousin), the two 35-year-old friends have already grown estranged over the derailment of Sarah’s marriage after her reckless affair with a young Arab man. Sarah is a political bleeding-heart photographer who champions the Palestinian cause, while Ofra, a plain, selfless graduate student, maintains the academic distance of a wary observer as Sarah throws herself into dramas both domestic and national. Her impulsive marriage to army medic Udi produces her son, Mims, and a seemingly blissful arrangement whereby Ofra contributes equally to the care of the boy; yet Sarah’s ambivalence about motherhood and marriage prompts her to fall for an arrogant Palestinian, Marwan, whose family and social constraints eventually lead him to dump her brutally. Meanwhile, in France, a separate storyline begins, this involving Ofra’s extended French family as they cope with bruised feelings pertaining to the funeral of gay cousin Michel, whose grievance with the French airline he (and his father) worked for remains unclear. It may be that much here suffers in translation—a kind of coy obliqueness, for example, about Arab-Jewish relations (and also Jewish-Gentile dealings in French society) that may not be immediately graspable by the American reader. “Bugs trapped inside a jar, that’s what we are here,” Udi comments, seemingly referring to the Israeli penchant for euphemism and self-deception. Too, the climax involving Sarah’s beating is buried under disorienting layers of narrative back-and-forth, and her erratic behavior in switching between Udi and Marwan appears merely self-serving and unworthy of Ofra’s earnest friendship.

Imperfect and mis-titled yet incisive, Bliss provides a colloquial glimpse at the Israeli social fabric.

Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2003

ISBN: 0-8050-6602-0

Page Count: 252

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
AND THE BRIDE CLOSED THE DOOR
by Ronit Matalon ; translated by Jessica Cohen

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SOUND OF OUR STEPS
by Ronit Matalon ; translated by Dalya Bilu

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.