Middle Eastern Fiction, Jewish Fiction & Literature, Love & Relationships - Fiction, Middle Eastern Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction

Her Body Knows

Name: Her Body Knows
Author: David Grossman
ISBN: 9780312425050

by David Grossman, Jessica Cohen

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Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A fevered storyteller and a captive audience revisit the past in both of David Grossman's novellas, trying to make sense of a betrayal that neither one can put to rest. In Frenzy, a reserved and respectable man draws his sister-in-law into a paranoid conviction—-that his wife is having an affair. In the title novella, a successful but embittered novelist delivers a merciless account of her dying mother's love affair with a much younger teenage boy. "Suffused with delirious tension and characters more substantial than in most novels twice its size" (The Village Voice), Her Body Knows is a disquieting journey into the nature of infidelity and desire.

Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The Washington Post - Judy Goldman

Grossman is a talented writer -- elegant, even luxurious. A resident of Jerusalem and the author of six novels, as well as three nonfiction books about the Middle East, he's won the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature, the Israeli Book Publishers' Association Prize for best novel and the Jerusalem Writer's House Prize for First Work. His writing is achingly sensual, the humor sly. He takes his time, disconnecting characters' relationships and then reconnecting small parts, bit by bit. Though the pacing might test a reader's patience, the language is always lush and generous.

About the Author, David Grossman

David Grossman is the author of six novels, most recently Someone to Run With (2004); two works of journalism, The Yellow Wind (1988) and Sleeping on a Wire (1993); and a volume of collected commentary, Death as a Way of Life (2003). He lives in Jerusalem.

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Editorials

Judy Goldman

Publishers Weekly

Love has many guises in these two novellas-but it never looks like something you'd aspire to. Israeli writer Grossman is more interested in its perverse forms-jealousy, egocentrism, obsession, voyeurism-but also the ways in which we invent the people we love through fantasy. In "Frenzy," Shaul, a respectable academic, feverishly stalks his wife, Elisheva, convinced she has been having an affair with another man for 10 years. He asks his sister-in-law, Esti, to drive him across the country in the middle of the night in search of Elisheva, and as he describes a decade of watching and waiting and imagining every last detail of Elisheva's betrayal, Esti finds herself getting pulled into Shaul's obsession. In "In Another Life," a writer named Rotem visits her estranged mother, Nili, now dying from cancer. Rotem shares her latest story, a fictional exploration of an episode from her childhood in which her mother is the central character. As Rotem reads aloud, Grossman switches back and forth from Rotem's story to the present moment. The reader sees Nili, and then sees her as Rotem imagines her, while the narrative hovers somewhere between memory and fiction. Grossman (See Under: Love, etc.) can capture surprising psychological depth in a single sentence, and here he opens up whole lives on every page. Agent, Deborah Harris. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Versatile Israeli novelist/journalist Grossman (Someone To Run With) provides two intense and engaging novellas that explore the intersecting planes of physical and imaginative being. The first depicts the hell of passion internalized as paranoia, detailing a man's obsessive, agonized imaginings about his wife's affair, which tensely unfold in dialog and fantasy during a lengthy car ride with his sister-in-law. The second, vastly compelling novella follows a writer inventively re-creating her dying mother's relationship with a young yoga student. This tale encompasses epic mother/daughter psychic battles, the struggle for autonomy forced upon the child of a powerful and gifted parent, and a vivid description of Hatha Yoga from the inside out ("She becomes focused, brimming with warmth inside; long threads of glowing tenderness flow through her limbs, and she walks around inside her body, inside the beautiful city of Brahma"). Grossman's work is graced with dynamic, flawed, and utterly believable characters and masterful internal and external dialogs. Deeply moving and beautifully written, this book is highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/05.]-Laurie Sullivan, Sage Group International, Nashville Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Two novellas about erotic obsession, by Israeli author Grossman (Someone to Run With, 2004, etc.). The first, "Frenzy," details the strange case of Shaul, an Israeli civil servant. Now 55, he has been married for 25 years to Elisheva, who runs a day care center. Every morning, Elisheva leaves for her ritual swim, ostensibly, but Shaul knows better; she is actually enjoying trysts with Paul, a Soviet Union immigrant she once counseled. This has been going on for ten years, like clockwork. Shaul tolerates the infidelity, mentioning nothing. On a long car ride, he confides all to his sister-in-law Esti, who realizes that the trysts are Shaul's fantasies. Shaul's own sex life with his wife has dwindled to the joyless coupling of sleepwalkers, and, as a counterbalance, thinks Esti, he feasts masochistically on encounters that satisfy body and soul, "the essence of his life." For the reader, Shaul is never more than a case history who needs to get a life, and the other piece, "In Another Life," is equally contrived. Rotem is an Israeli woman writer who has relocated to London but is now back in Israel to visit her dying mother, Nili. Their relationship has been troubled. Nili was a sometimes neglectful mother who once abandoned Rotem and her sisters to go on a wild-goose chase for a former yoga student. Now, Rotem is reading to her mother her fictional reconstruction of that key episode. In her version, Nili is teaching yoga at a rundown Dead Sea resort when she becomes enchanted by 15-year-old Kobi, a desperately unhappy youth who has attempted suicide. Kobi responds positively to her exercises, which culminate in Nili's massage of the naked boy. Though the language is drenched in eroticism,the chaste teacher-student prevails in an uncomfortable standoff. Nili never finds her Kobi, but the reconstruction purges mother and daughter of their old resentments. Lackluster studies with little narrative payoff.