Accidents

by Yael Hedaya

Book Overview

For Shira Klein, Yonatan Luria, and his daughter, Dana, it is winter--winter at work, winter among friends, winter at home, and winter of the heart. Yonatan is a marginal writer, a fifty-year-old... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805073485
• ISBN13: 9780805073485
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 453 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

My thoughts on...

All the stuff that is usually left out of a "regular" love story can be found in this - the real stuff. The smells, the flaws, the bickering, the uncertainty - all the things that make a real-life love story real. Hedaya has managed to take three characters who are all somewhat unlikable and somehow merge them into a likeable whole - or if not likeable, at least relatable. The characters in this book could be your neighbors, your relatives, your friends, or whoever else just walks down the street - their pain is real, as is their anger, their lust, and their love. And, as with real people, they are at times absolutely hilarious and at others absolutely heart-breaking!

good, but with some problems

I liked this book, but felt many problems were unresolved. It sort of left me hanging. I was looking for a bit more from this otherwise very interesting book about real people.

A great love story for the Internet Age

This novel follows the coming together as a family of Yonatan Luria, a novelist with writer's block since the death of his wife, Ilana, in a mundane auto accident; his daughter, Dana, dealing with not just the loss of her mother but the early onset of puberty; and Shira Klein, also a novelist with writer's block and a woman who has never quite learned how to be loved. Its almost onmniscient narrator follows not just their feelings, but more importantly their memories, which seem to come to them at odd moments fully-formed like the packets of information that float over the internet. Yonatan and Shira meet at the home of Dana's friend Tamar and her mother Rona (Tamar has no father, just an anonymous sperm donor) and we follow in minute detail as they slowly fall in love, Shira moves in with the Lurias, Dana withdraws into a shell, Shira begins to write again, Yonatan gives up writing entirely and becomes a lecturer, Dana and Shira develop a warm relationship that is not mother-daugher and Shira's father slowly withers and dies. In the end, we know that the future for this family will be good and loving, but will include repeats of the moments when Shira confronts her father's death and Yonatan sees his mother growing old, because that is the way of the world. Two things stand out: first, these are real people, not Hollywood type characters. They smell, they sweat, they smoke, they eat fatty foods. They wear old sweatshirts and underwear that has lost its shape and color. Yonatan is never seen without his green Chuck Taylors. They drive beater cars and struggle to afford digital thermometers, not Manolo Blahniks. Second, Hedaya is a painstakingly patient writer. She will take pages to describe a few moments, such as the first time when Yonatan takes Shira's hand and how for each of them the whole world disappears outside the place where their hands meet. In a single sentence, she will describe two different people's emotions, and then depart immediately into the full story of, say, Dana's day when her mother died, because it was at that point in the story that she remembers it. Dialogue, detail, description are all spot on. It is impossible to understand this novel without understanding its political context, which is that it does not allow politics to intervene. The novel is set in Israel, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem mainly, but this is not the Israel you will see on television, read about in the New York Times or hear Pat Robertson sermonize about. They are not hasidim, do not live on kibbutzes or in settlements on the West Bank. They are secular Jews (Yonatan buys bacon along with steak at his butcher), urban and urbane, living in Israel because that is their home. Ilana did not die in a suicide bombing, but in a car accident. Palestinians are mentioned just twice in the whole book, once when Yonatan lists terrorist acts as among the things he worries about when Dana is off on her own, and once when he follows a Palestinian taxi