Unto Death: Crusade/Late Love

By Amos Oz

Book Overview

"Brilliant and insistent . . . The prose is sharp as a cameo, simple yet compelling, smoky, precise, lustrous, eerie." -- Boston Sunday Globe

Here Amos Oz captures the atmosphere of hatred in which Jews have lived, died, and struggled for understanding.

In Crusade, a band of soldiers journeys toward the Holy Land, killing any Jews they encounter; but soon the Crusaders face their own reckoning, as disease and deprivation take their toll.

Late Love portrays an aged lecturer in modern Israel with paranoid visions of the destruction of his people at the hands of the Soviets. He is out of touch with a younger and saner generation, but knows they must be warned.

"Powerfully written, with subtlety and flagrance delicately balanced." -- Austin American-Statesman

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156931702
• ISBN13: 9780156931700
• Release Date: May 1978
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An early sign of a great talent

This is one of Amos Oz's earlier works and the reader can already notice his amazing skill with words. The book contains two stories: The first one takes place in Medieval Europe and tells the story of a crusade that begins after several ominous events spread through the villages.With his unique language Oz leads the reader through the crusade that soon becomes a horrifying descent into the darkest pits of human cruelty, primal fears and blind violence and torture unto the eventual tragic ending of the novella. The second story describes the small, uneventful life of a lonely old man and his fantasies - about the nurse in the outpatient clinic, about an Israeli military force to be sent back in time to take revenge from the Nazis etc. Reading this early book exposes the reader to Oz's virtuoso ability with words that can either pound like a sledgehammer or flutter on one's face like the wind from a butterfly's flight