The Confessions of Noa Weber

The first 30 pages are annoying. Basically a love sick woman going on and on about her loser BF. But then - it gets more profound and insightful. And you start saying things like, "I thought I was the only one who thought things like that!!". This book delves into the pysche of the female mind like no other book. If that idea bores you, don't read it. If that idea intrigues you, RUN and pick this up. Just be patient enough to get to the good parts.

An interior monologue of disparate layers of introspection, where the emotional, physical and spiritual obsessions of Noa Weber are unearthed with a gravedigger's distance and the archeologist's mindfulness alike. We find a woman obsesed with her unbidden love for a mysterious man in such merciless honesty and unscrupled dissecting (yet always endowed with a poetic cadence) that bring to the surface strata of consciousness, cultural discord (contemporary Israel and the social expectations implicated); the dismay of an academic (Noa is a respected professor possessing all the trappings of a "feminist" life); and the desire to make sense of a psychologically unexplainable valence Noa has awarded to her passion for Alek. Noa has a daughter - whom she raised on her own: the troubles of her pregnancy are evoked in a most startlingly relentless intimacy with the culture and femininity in a way that this side of Toni Morrison has rarely been indulged in (in fiction). The modern-day setting of a turbulant and globalized Israel is of consequence but never detail-heavy, and references abound to movies and books which are of the most common stock to Western culture - such as Ginsberg and Casablanca. The exceptional feat of this narrative is that it fathoms the fetishes and thwarted desires of a woman whose voice resounds deep within the well of loss and hope where her wish to examine the most bewildering experience of her life becomes a means of transforming the irrational into transcendent wisdom. Love in spite of psychology...

I've been in a reading rut for a while, but I've just started this book and I can safely say that I'm totally sucked in. Rut = over. I'm really interested in the contrast between the protagonist's interior life and the way she is seen by the rest of the world. I'm also impressed by Bilu's translation - Israeli critics have hailed Hareven's beautiful use of language, and I'm glad to see that the translation doesn't seem to lose any of that beauty or talent.