- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Penguin (May 1 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670068667
- ISBN-13: 978-0670068661
- Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 13.2 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 386 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #229,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
To six-year-old Dori, everything seems possible. To her family and their Peers—secular, left-leaning North American Jews—the young state of Israel seems to offer the same promise, as the starry-eyed kibbutz movement prepares the ground for their ideals of justice and cooperation to take root and flourish. They settle on Eldar in northern Galilee, determined to create a new utopia, but life on this remote hill, three kilometres from the Lebanese border, is far more complex than any of its inhabitants could have imagined.
The Last Rain tells the story of Eldar's emergence as a kibbutz through the eyes of Dori, as well as through documentary fragments that take the reader on a labyrinthine journey through the characters' collective past. With humour, sensitivity, and a deep love for the land, The Last Rain follows the coming of age not only of a young girl, but also of a country in the first fraught years of its existence.
About the Author
Edeet Ravel is the author of the Tel Aviv Trilogy Ten Thousand Lovers (finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award), Look For Me (winner of Hugh MacLennan Prize), and A Wall of Light (finalist for the Regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize and winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award). She currently lives in Guelph.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
superbly written,
This review is from: Last Rain, The (Hardcover)
This is one of the best books I've read in a while -- a kibbutz is built on the ruins of an Arab village by a group of idealistic Jews from North America and the results are portrayed in striking detail by one of the children. The socialist enterprise is barely holding itself together at first, but sixty years later it's running a billion dollar industry. Highly recommended - you'll discover things about the kibbutz you never imagined.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing!,
By Robin Jacobson - Published on Amazon.com
At one point in The Last Rain, Edeet Ravel's intriguing and revealing novel, Dori, the six-year old narrator, reflects that she doesn't like books that are hybrids: a book with photographs should be about things that really happened and not tell invented stories. In a playful move, the author follows this comment with a photograph from what appear to be her own archives, showing her at Dori's age. She captions the photo "genre confusion."This is one of many gently humorous and playful touches in this clever, hybrid novel, set on a kibbutz in the 1950s. The author makes it clear, both in her foreword and through the use of external material, that her novel is in many ways a memoir, but she has chosen to present her story through fiction, thus allowing for multiple points of view and layers of meaning. The novel includes notes in which the writer herself appears in an instant messaging conversation with someone called "Nissim" in which she seems to be discussing the process of writing the novel. The novel is both fascinating and moving. Dori's mother keeps a diary in which the challenges of feeding a newborn who lives in a communal Children's House are shown to be to some degree insurmountable; forced to distance herself from her daughter, the mother begins to refer to her baby as "the girl." A diary kept by a young man on one of the first kibbutzim, in the 1920s, is a revelation. Most prominent, however, is the collective diary of the kibbutz founders, who in stunningly lyrical prose, and with surprising honesty, describe their exuberance as well as their guilt about usurping the inhabitants of what was, until a few months before their arrival, an Arab town. Characters are developed through comical autobiographical fiction (Dori's father), excerpts from an amateur play (Dori's mother), kibbutz meetings, and above all through Dori's captivating voice. Dori's life, like that of her fellow kibbutz members, is filled with hardship, and the echoes of tragedy are everywhere, but the author's sense of irony and deft comic touch never falter, and promote the message which appears at the end of the acknowledgements: "No one here is leaving, so we had better start loving." For anyone interested in utopian movements, human folly, Israel's history, and in a child's take on it all, this novel is a must.
5.0 out of 5 stars
superbly written,
By Janos Juhasz - Published on Amazon.com
This is one of the best books I've read in a while -- a kibbutz is built on the ruins of an Arab village by a group of idealistic Jews from North America and the results are portrayed in striking detail by one of the children. The socialist enterprise is barely holding itself together at first, but sixty years later it's running a billion dollar industry. Highly recommended - you'll discover things about the kibbutz you never imagined.
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