Daniel del Real
Moderator
Honestly, I expected much more about this novel. After great readings like The Same Sea & Scenes from Village Life, this novel takes us to an early stage, where is clearly visible that his writing skills where still in formation. He was in his late twenties when he published this novel, a very ambitious creation as he defies one of the most difficult things to be done by an author: write from the perspective from the other gender. The novel is told by a female character named Jana, and she describes her life with Mijael since the moment she met him, through his first years of marriage and the formation of his family. However, the feminine voice never turns to be a solid part of a description of the male character, personalities are never completely determined and defined and we can only see glimpses of the real characters behind the names and the acts. It doesn't have the feeling of rant, complaint and rupture coming from a fed up feminine voice who decides to speak her mind out to the male, something that can be seen in great novels like Miguel Delibes's Cinco Horas con Mario and more recently in The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi. The best part of the novel, is the language, as the prose by Oz is very lyrical as in his following works, providing terrific descriptions of the 50's Jerusalem. An early incursion of a promising writer at the time than became a reality; a novel from a gestation period that later would develop one of the stronger pens we have nowadays.