Rhyming Life & Death

From the Publisher

"From the prodigious Oz comes a delightfully elusive if slight story of imagination, talent and the transitory nature of fame...Stamped with Oz's charm and graceful skill in creating rich characters, this is a must for any fan."

-Publishers Weekly

"Israeli novelist Amos Oz performs an exquisite balancing act in his taut, evocative novel Rhyming Life & Death, which immerses readers in the vagaries of the creative process, never letting us forget that there’s an author pulling the strings, making the decisions, however arbitrary, and making us complicit in the illusion that these words on the page somehow represent lives lived, destinies fulfilled and desires thwarted...[A] spellbinding fable."

-Kirkus Reviews, UpFront Review

 "Hilarious and profound, Oz’s tale of a mischievous taleteller ponders the eroticism of stories and the mysterious ways language and literature bridge the divide between inner and outer worlds; and it helps us make some sense, however gossamer, of life and death. A slyly philosophical novel."

-Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Beguiling...funny and philosophical...a surprisingly playful departure for Oz." - Financial Times "The book is a meditation on the art of writing, the relationship between literature and life, between life and death, and also about the nature and significance of literary fame....the work of a master...A book you are likely to return to." - The Scotsman "...it is fascinating to witness this assured and experienced writer address such basic novelistic concerns as life and death, love and sex, language and silence, along a spectrum from cynicism, through humour to candour." - Sunday Telegraphy   "...a deft way with quirky deail, a master class in interlocking character sketches, and a fable on themes of sex, death and writing ;pitched somewhere between the fictional universes of JM Coetzee and Milan Kundera." - The Guardian  "Delectable...Amos Oz's Rhyming Life and Death is a midsummer night's dream."
- Buffalo News  "...a juicily sadistic fable of creation." - Slate

Publishers Weekly

From the prodigious Oz comes a delightfully elusive if slight story of imagination, talent and the transitory nature of fame. The novella takes place over the course of a suffocatingly hot evening, narrated by an unnamed writer who whiles away his time at a Tel Aviv cafe a few hours before a dreaded reading. As he meditates on the inevitably asinine questions attendees will ask, he concocts stories about those around him. There is Ricky, the pretty waitress who is heartbroken over her first love, football-playing Charlie, who left her for a beauty pageant runnerup. Later, at the reading, he imagines that his listeners include a trade union hack and a low-ranking activist. As the night winds down with an awkward romantic entanglement with Rochele Reznik, a professional reader, he continues to revisit and expand upon the scenarios he has created. Woven throughout are rhymes by a local poet who was once quite beloved, but now the author cannot even recall if he is still alive. Stamped with Oz's charm and graceful skill in creating rich characters, this is a must for any fan. (Apr.)

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Library Journal

Oz, a leading Israeli author prolific in both fiction and nonfiction (e.g., A Tale of Love and Darkness), has written a new work with a clever conceit: it covers eight hours before, during, and after a talk given by an author to a literary group in 1980s Tel Aviv. The author dreads the usual questions: "Why do you write?" "What is it like being famous?" As he is being endlessly introduced, he amuses himself by creating scenarios with characters inspired by the audience in front of him. In fact, he had begun this process earlier in a cafA©, where he has sexual fantasies about a waitress whom he dubs Ricky. During the event, professional reader Rochele Resnick reads from his work, and afterward the author offers to walk her home. A sexual encounter ensues; in another take, the author writes a scene that doesn't work out so well for either of them. Scenes with gangsters, a poet (hinted at in the title), and lonely, sick, and old people are accompanied by comments on the labor movement in Israel, thoughts on writing, and the role of literature. This postmodern novella could be the sherbet between courses for the accomplished Oz-and his readers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ12/08.]
—Molly Abramowitz

Kirkus Reviews

As an exercise in literary gamesmanship, metafiction subverts the typical relationship between author and reader. Though lit-crit scholars may ponder the essence of words on a page and what they might possibly "mean," readers generally want to lose themselves in a riveting plot driven by characters of depth, coherence and verisimilitude, whose fates reveal something essential about our lives and our world. Israeli novelist Amos Oz performs an exquisite balancing act in his taut, evocative novel Rhyming Life & Death, which immerses readers in the vagaries of the creative process, never letting us forget that there's an author pulling the strings, making the decisions-however arbitrary-and making us complicit in the illusion that these words on the page somehow represent lives lived, destinies fulfilled and desires thwarted. "He wrote more or less the way he dreamed or masturbated," explains the protagonist known only as "the Author," a creative projection of the author (Oz). "[With] a mixture of compulsion, enthusiasm, despair, disgust and wretchedness."As Oz takes us inside the writer's mind, nothing much that happens within this novel exists outside that creative consciousness. The Author has agreed to appear at the "monthly meeting of the Good Book Club at the refurbished Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack Cultural Centre." Before his appearance, he sits in a coffee shop, anticipating all of the questions that he has heard so many times before and has never been able to answer adequately for himself: "Why do you write?...What role do your books play?" And so on. Yet a waitress who catches his eye and libido means more to him than all of those unanswerable questions.Certainly more than the pronouncements of the literary critic who will accompany him onstage, making grand, Clintonian assertions about "the actual meaning of the term ‘meaning.' " Instead, the Author finds himself spinning a narrative in his head about the waitress, a narrative that will eventually encompass other elements. Reality, in these pages at least, exists only in the mind of the Author, who, of course, exists only in the mind of Oz. After the questions and answers with his readers, the Author may or may not have a sexual encounter, one in which he must try to conjure a narrative that will counter his self-consciousness and allow him to rise to the occasion. In fact, it's up to the reader to determine whether the plot takes this course or another. As Oz reminds us throughout this spellbinding fable, readers are partners with novelists in this enterprise of fiction, imagining in our heads what exists only as words on a page.