Husband and Wife
Zeruya Shalev, Dalya BiluBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
"Husband and Wife is a novel that takes us into the heartbreak and compromise of a diseased marriage that may or may not be capable of healing. With the emotional intensity and searing lyricism that have earned her overwhelming international acclaim, Zeruya Shalev explores the true nature of love, lust, and family, and dares to ask the question upon which everything comes to rest: When all is threatened, should one hold on even tighter, or let go?" "Na'ama and Udi Newman have many of the trappings of an idyllic shared existence. A couple since they were schoolchildren, they have grown together like vines and settled into a routine of calm domesticity, along with their young daughter, Noga. But in a scene worthy of Kafka, the quiet rhythms of their family life suddenly screech to a halt when Udi wakes up one morning to find that he is unable to move his legs. The doctors quickly set about searching for a physical explanation, and Na'ama herself goes to desperate lengths to jump-start his ailing body. But it soon becomes painfully clear that his paralysis is a symptom of something far less tangible and far more insidious than any of them had imagined." This one morning sets in motion a series of events that reveals a vicious cycle of jealousy, paranoia, resentment, and accumulated injuries that now threaten to tear the small family apart. Na'ama, always intent on upholding the structure of her marriage despite its possibly rotting foundation, is now forced to confront all that festers beneath the surface.Synopsis
A rising star of international letters, Zeruya Shalev takes us on a compelling narrative journey in the exquisite and unsettling Husband and Wife. Na'ama and Udi Newman have many of the trappings of an idyllic shared existence. A couple since they were schoolchildren, they have grown together like vines and settled into a routine of calm domesticity, along with their young daughter, Noga. But in a scene worthy of Kafka, the quiet rhythms of their family life suddenly screech to a halt when Udi wakes up one morning to find that he is unable to move his legs. The doctors quickly set about searching for a physical explanation, but it soon becomes painfully clear that his paralysis is a symptom of something far less tangible, and far more insidious than any of them had imagined. This one morning sets in motion a series of events that reveals a vicious cycle of jealousy, paranoia, resentment, and accumulated injuries that now threaten to tear the small family apart. Shaleve brilliantly captures the vulnerability and deceptive comforts of lives intertwined in this deeply disturbing portrait of a diseased marriage.
Publishers Weekly
Little occurs outside the racing mind of Na'ama Newman, the intensely thoughtful narrator of this second novel by Shalev (Love Life). Na'ama is a social worker who heals ailing young mothers and their children, though she is unable to turn an observant eye on the lives of her own husband and child, or herself. When her husband, Udi, a healthy hiking guide who periodically leaves the family for long, solitary jaunts into nature, wakes up one morning unable to move his legs, Na'ama begins an inner monologue, wrestling over whether to take him to the hospital, where she will surely have to share him and the blame for whatever ails him with nurses, doctors and the rest of the world, or whether to keep him at home, where she and their nine-year-old daughter Noga can finally have a constant relationship with him. As Udi lies in bed, Na'ama's thoughts crash against each other: she recalls a brief though damaging affair, the perfection of her and Udi's adolescent love, and the ways Noga has borne the brunt of their sour marriage. When Na'ama learns Udi is suffering from conversive paralysis, a sickness in which mental stress is expressed physically, she is wildly jealous of the illness, saying, "so that's what she's called, his new woman, conversion." Shalev, an Israeli literary editor, has created a novel entirely devoid of standard dialogue, choosing instead to convey snatches of conversation, arguments and whispers of love in stream-of-consciousness prose. Her language is hauntingly, painfully lyrical, and her understanding of the conflicted human yearning for connection and solitude astounds. (Aug.) Forecast: Love Life, Shalev's first novel, has been published in 11 languages and was a number one bestseller in Israel. With this beautifully written and packaged second effort, Shalev may gain a wider readership in the U.S. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.