The Lover

by A.B. Yehoshua

Book Overview

"Elusive, haunting."--New York Times Book Review

A husband's search for his wife's lover, lost amid the turbulence of the Yom Kippur War, is the heart of this dreamlike novel. Through five different perspectives, Yehoshua explores the realities and consequences of the affair and the search, laying bare deep-rooted tensions within family, between generations, between Jews and Arabs.

"[A] profound study of personal and political trauma."...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156539128
• ISBN13: 9780156539128
• Release Date: May 1993
• Publisher: Harpervia
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The reasons one have to search for a substitute

It's an amazing book! Like other books by Yehoshua, you finish reading it and the story still goes on in your mind. Besides giving a fierce view of the israeli society during the Yom Kippur war ('70s), the author also pictures very well this strange world where we are like ghosts barely touching each other. The situations and reasons to take action the characters have are underlined by this sense of survival and urgence to protect themselves and their on achieviements, despite the sacrifice they apparently are willing to make. It's like they are ready to sacrifice their relationships in order to maintain their own balance. The goal is, no mather what we do to keep institutions alive we end up alone and struggling to keep what we already got as an heritage.

The Best book I have read in years.

A. B Yehoshua has written his masterpiece. The characters seem to come to life in his writing. This book captures so much of the political chaos and yet it does it in a reverant and kind way. My two favorite characters were Dafna and Adam. They were so full of love and kindness. I read this book two months ago and can't seem to get it out of my head. It is a must read.

an extraordinary book one of the best contemporary novelists

Not only is it a startlingly humane, nuanced and difficult portrait of Israel, by an Israeli, but one of the most profound explorations of humanity in its daily round of work and thought I have read.

My favorite Israeli Novel

This novel, written shortly after the disastrous Yom Kippur war, captures the complexity of Israeli society through the lives of normal participants. Rather than lambaste the reader with a litany of politics, the book follows the slightly bizarre, but highly symbolic life of an Israeli family as they attempt to find the Wife's lover - a lapsed Jew from France who returned seeking an inheritance. The story is unpretentious and surprisingly readable. The author's style is to present each new chapter through the voice of a different character, often retelling the same events from several perspectives.Through these perspectives - a wealthy secular mechanic, a conflicted rebellious teenage girl, an aging zionist intellectual wife, an elderly native sephardic, a ambitious intelligent palestinian boy, and ultimately through the story of the Lover himself - Yehoshua uncovers the complex stuff that constitutes a very strangely formed nation.Nuanced, delightfully blasphemous accounts of Zionism like this one are not permitted to be spoken here in the US - but of course in Israel, sophisticated debates about the nature of their society are part and parcel of intellectual life.Enjoy this book. I give it my highest recommendation.

Israel's Faulkner in a tour de force

In a most unusual storyline, a man searches for his wife's lover in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the meantime, early tension of the Jewish state is plumbed: Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi, man vs. woman, Arab vs. Jew. Told from constantly oscillating viewpoints in the spirit of Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying*, Yehoshua presents a hyperrealistic portrait of modern-day Israel.