A random book I picked up without knowing a thing about it (although
knowing fully well how much I like Oz’s writing). A really enjoyable read,
despite the fact that it took me a couple of weeks to finish it over the
holidays (I’ll blame family and friends’ visits – and the consequent lack of
quality “me time” – for that).
I always tell my students to read something by Oz or Yehoshua (in the
case of the latter I normally refer to his novels, not his borderline senile newspaper
columns) to prepare for classes on the Arab-Israeli conflict – they never
listen, but at least I try – and A
Perfect Peace, with its comments
on the Six Day War and more generally on Israeli politics, will clearly be no
exception.
The novel is insightful and ironic, in particular in its first half
(which the author wrote much earlier than the second part), the comments on life
in the kibbutz are deep and informative, and a number of the characters are
particularly interesting (the relatively minor ones often more so than the
central triangle of Yonatan, Rimona and Azariah). The second half of the novel,
however, has an underlying sentimentally that I struggled with…
