From Publishers Weekly
The Israeli writer's previous novels ( A Late Divorce ; Five Seasons ) were critically acclaimed in this country; here he offers another richly textured, provocative work. An account of six generations of the Manis, a Jewish family living in the Middle East, the book is arranged in the form of five "conversations," with the speech of only one of the two speakers present on the page. From 1982, the narrative moves backward to 1848, tracing dark domestic dramas occurring against the backdrop of historical events. Speakers--each with a strong, distinctive voice--include a contemporary Israeli woman, a Nazi soldier stationed in Crete during WW II, a British Jewish soldier in Palestine after WW I, a Jewish doctor in Galicia and a Jewish merchant in Athens. Spinning a cat's cradle of complex relationships, Yehoshua reaches beyond realism to the realms of mystery, coincidence and fate. His prose is simple and clear, rising to passages of lyricism and eloquence, as he gradually discloses the tragedy that haunts every generation of the Mani family: a succession of self-destructive, suicidal men and of fathers who die young, leaving emotionally needy children. Hints of a dread secret accrete through the narrative, to be revealed at the close. Yet the novel's message speaks to the indomitable spirit that keeps families alive.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A self-consciously experimental novel from Israeli writer Yehoshua (Five Seasons, A Late Divorce, etc.) in which a family's history is told backwards in one-sided conversations. There are five conversations, each accompanied by a brief foreword and afterword--sort of program notes--that explicate as well as wrap up the story. The conversations themselves, with the exception of the final one, are those of strangers who recall their subsequently significant interventions in the history of the Mani family, currently of Jerusalem but once residents of Greece. Beginning in present-day Israel, Hagar Shiloh, back on the kibbutz where she was reared, tells her mother how she saved Mr. Mani, the father of her lover, from committing suicide. Conversation number two, between a German soldier and his grandmother, takes place on Crete during WW II and accounts for Mr. Mani's childhood escape from the Germans. The third conversation (which has appeared in The New Yorker) details the reprieve that British authorities devise in WW I for the then-current Mr. Mani, on trial for treason. And so genealogy retreats through conversations with a Polish doctor, whose sister's departure from Jerusalem drove Moshe Mani to suicide in 1899, and ends as Avraham Mani, in Athens, confesses in 1848 to his aged rabbi that he has impregnated his widowed daughter-in-law so that the family would continue. Not as dryly schematic as Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, but the structure, however innovative and brilliantly executed, is constraining; and retrohistory too much resembles all those confusing biblical lists of A's begetting B's. Still, an interesting, and certainly challenging, read. --
Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
