Rhyming Life & Death

In the hands of a less skilled writer, or a skilled writer who is lazy and at the very end of his of her career, a novel like Rhyming Life and Death could devolve into shallow cliché and short hand for more profound ideas and subject matter. But Amos Oz takes this small book, with its post modern type character "The Author" and creates a story that is deeply moving and human. Although using some stock post-modern tricks, Oz never allows the literary devices to do the work for him. He is always conscious that the created work should do its own labor, and not the trick. So this short novel, while feeling very late (in the way Philip Roth's last four books have felt late) is anything but underdeveloped (as Roth's last four books have been underdeveloped); Amos Oz is still capable of producing works of fiction which stand on their own merits. One should read Rhyming in Life and Death no matter who wrote the work.

And clearly what Amos Oz was after here was less a novel than his description of what is a novel, how characters find their shapes, when an author is off stage and when he's on (lying, I loved that) and this is just in a way a primer answering the questions that readers ask of famous authors. It's show not tell but essentially Oz is telling us what it is like to be a famous writer and how that writer observes, imagines and how what he speaks is detached and untrue at times but that what he sees gets transformed by imagination. Generous of Oz to answer the usual questions put to him and others in midlife who achieve fame for writing imaginary things. He's showing as said but he's also telling in his own novelistic way.

Oz. Amos. "Rhyming Life and Death", Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Sex and Death Amos Lassen Amos Oz gives us a work of satire as he presents us with The Author, a man who mocks the celebrity status that authors sometimes get. The Author has a vivid imagination and when we meet him he arrives late to a reading because he was held captive looking at the rear parts of a waitress. This brings a story to his mind and he becomes totally a part of a love affair that proves disastrous. When he finally makes it onstage he makes up stories about people in the audience while at the same time he thinks about a poet who everyone quotes. The book is a balancing act which shows us the creative process but never allowing us to forget that the man who wrote the book is manipulating us as we read and we make our decisions according to his wisher. The book is profound and very funny and is a meditation on writing and the relationship of literature to life. This is the modernist novel and Oz plays with it by using themes that are both serious and satirical. The boundaries of reality and imagination are blurred and there are loose ends and overdeveloped ideas throughout but the novel is a satisfying read. This is a surreal journey into The Author's imagination and the plot is tenuous but rewarding if you have the patience to wait it out.

When the Author, the otherwise unnamed main character of Amos Oz's newest work, arrives as the special guest for a literary evening at a community center in Tel Aviv, he expects the usual sorts of questions from his audience--Why do you write? What role do your books play? How would you define yourself? What his audience never suspects is that the author, while answering their sometimes intrusive questions about himself, is secretly inventing names and imaginary lives for them, connecting them to each other, and even continuing his musings about them well after the meeting is concluded. Approximately thirty-five characters, either in the audience or peripheral to their stories, dominate the Author's interior life, even as the real humans behind these stories are talking with him about his work. Among these characters is Tsefania Beit-Halachmi (also known as Avraham "Bumek" Schuldenfrei), an (imaginary) elderly poet who is the author of a poetry collection called "Rhyming Life and Death." These poems echo throughout the book--mostly doggerel--as both the narrator/Author and the book's author, Amos Oz, explore serious questions of life and death, and eventually some less serious questions of sex and death. After the meeting, the Author escorts the unattractive and painfully shy Rochele Reznik home to her apartment, hoping for an evening of passion. His failure leads him to explore the ideas of Arnold Bartok, a part-time philosopher (invented) who has noted that "It is not life and death that came into the world as a pair, but sex and death." Death, Bartok believes, appeared when sexual reproduction was created, and it is sex that has led to aging and death. "We simply have to find a way of eliminating sex," he says, "so as to rid our world of the inevitability of death." Modernist in approach, Oz plays with the book's form, creating a wide cast of overlapping characters who exemplify his themes, both serious and tongue-in-cheek. The attractive waitress at the café becomes "Ricky," whose boyfriend "Charlie" has also enjoyed the favors of "Lucy," who married the son of Ovadya Hazzam, who won a lottery and is now dying of cancer in a miserable hospital room. Miriam Nehorait, a middle-aged culture lover, may have had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old, hypersensitive young poet in the audience, and they may have been observed by a neighborhood snoop. Other characters are lonely, abandoned, and/or dying. Though the "novel" blurs the boundaries of reality and imagination and leaves a number of loose ends and undeveloped ideas, Oz provides an unusual and creative meditation on his themes and on the transience of happiness, life, love, and fame. Often darkly humorous and ironic, the author offers few, if any, glimmers of hope for the future. Life is what it is, and though we can escape from reality through dreams and our imaginations, Oz lets us know that sooner or later we must all "turn on the light to clarify what is going on