ISRAEL’S BEST BOOK EVER?
David Herman and Alan Montague in praise of a pair of contrasting novels involving plentiful “questionable decisions”
FOLLOWING THE deaths of Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz in 2018, David Grossman is surely now the greatest living Israeli writer. And his new novel, More Than I Love My Life, is arguably his best yet.
His best and his darkest. It is a story of three generations of women: Vera, who is 17 when she meets her first husband, Milosz, and 90 by the climax of the novel; her daughter Nina, who is in her teens when we first meet her and is in her sixties by the end of the novel; and Gili, Vera’s granddaughter and Nina’s daughter, who is in her thirties.
At the heart of the novel is a very simple tale. Two mothers have abandoned their daughters and their daughters cannot forgive them. The abandonment has ruined the daughters’ lives beyond repair. They are like records stuck in a groove. Everything went wrong when they were abandoned and they cannot forget or forgive.
There are also three men in the novel, but only one is still alive. One of the many questions that arise throughout the narrative is, what would have happened if the two dead men had lived longer? Would everything have been all right?
The mystery that runs through More Than I Love My Life is: why do these daughters hate their mothers? But what makes the book so powerful and complex is not just the daughters’ refusal to forgive, but the way Grossman lets the story unfold. At one point, Nina tells her husband Rafael: “My life is a mess.” And that is an understatement. “Her throaty laugh,” writes Grossman, “made him feel, again, that she was both hinting at something and obscuring it, as she always did.”
This is a perfect description of the novel. Like Nina, Grossman as author is constantly hinting at something and obscuring it, so you never quite know whether or not any kind of reconciliation or forgiveness is possible. Perhaps more importantly, you also never know whether this is a love story or not. Vera and Milosz love each other with a tremendous passion. He is the love of her life. Vera then comes to Israel and meets Tuvia, a widower, and they fall in love, but he remains in the shadow of Milosz. And further, Tuvia’s son, Rafael, loves Nina. But, in each case, love is outweighed by the lifelong resentments of the two daughters.
You could probably sum up all these complicated relations, tell the whole story of the novel, in one page. But its strength lies in the telling, the way Grossman keeps the story twisting and turning. He also constantly moves back and forward in time.
If you unwound the story and told it from beginning to end, you would start with the dance where Vera meets Milosz in 1935 and end in 2008 on a bleak island where there used to be a brutal Communist labour camp more than 50 years ago. But it keeps moving around. “What I wouldn’t give to return to the past,” Gili says, “just to prevent those two” — her parents — from ever meeting.”
And that is the point. People make crucial choices with disastrous consequences. They have their reasons. Vera does what she does because she loves her husband. Does love explain everything? Does it excuse anything? Can the daughters ever find out the truth about their mothers? “You cannot repair backward,” Vera tells her daughter Nina in her broken Hebrew. Or perhaps you can…