Synopsis
Meeting as strangers at a party, Raymond and Hannah stumble into a one-night stand with unexpected consequences. Together, they share a single, magical week before Hannah leaves for Jerusalem, where she is to spend nine months at an orthodox yeshiva learning Torah among students who disapprove of intermarriage. Raymond, a graduate student researching love in Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, struggles with his loneliness and Hannah’s increasing religiosity. Unable to make a clean break, they’re forced to try their insoluble problems in the city without solution, Jerusalem.
The New York Times - Meghan Daum
This is a slim novel, constructed on so small a scale that it occasionally comes close to suffocating from the postmodern fragmentation that is its chief stylistic conceit. Marche, who's only 29 years old, tends not to write fully rendered scenes, and instead lists the key players and events as if dictating notes to himself. But his minimalism is one of form, not content. The language he uses is so dazzling, so unsentimental, that the bones of the story become almost irrelevant. Besides, Marche isn't interested in telling an epic story. He's trying to sort through a series of contradictory moments over nine months in the lives of two people who, if they ''were a cocktail . . . would be two parts absence, one part presence.'' In so doing, he has produced a work that is both beautiful and confusing. In other words, an honest love story.