Another Israel

An acclaimed, newly translated David Grossman novel fails to work its magic on the reviewer.

By MATT NESVISKY
book (do not publish again) (photo credit: avi katz)
book (do not publish again)
(photo credit: avi katz)
EARLY ON IN THIS NOVEL, Ora, the central character, lies on the earth, scoops a shallow depression in the soil and grinds her face into it.
Hmm, I thought. Not like anyone I know.
Fiction, of course, is full of characters (Raskolnikov? Frodo?) unlike any folks we know. But the moment is particularly jolting because Grossman’s novel is set not in longago Czarist Russia or in some fanciful Middle Earth but in a contemporary Israel evoked in a painstakingly hyper-realistic style, replete with the familiar names of real personages, actual places and common name brands. Nevertheless, I frequently found Grossman’s Israel hard to recognize.
The book’s narrative framework is a trek along the northern portion of the Israel National Trail. Grossman’s landscape, however, contains so many rivers and springs and pools that I wondered if Ora weren’t actually on America’s Appalachian Trail. I lived in Upper Galilee for some years, and I certainly never saw so many watering holes, nor nearly as many oak trees as regularly burst from the pages of “To the End of the Land.” Nor the birches. Finally, Ora’s trek seems to grind on so long in little Israel that it seemed more likely she was walking the length of the Eastern seaboard of the United States, or maybe Europe from the shores of the Bosporus to the fjords of Norway.
I wanted to get all this promptly off my chest because, although I admire much in this novel, I cannot agree it is the masterpiece it has been declared both in its original Hebrew version, published in 2008, and in this evocative English translation by Jessica Cohen. I’ve long thought and still think Grossman’s finest work is “See Under: Love.” In fact, I’ve never yet read a Grossman book that I didn’t enjoy greatly, and this includes his recent and less wellreceived fictions, the madly obsessive and insular “Be My Knife” and “Her Body Knows.” No matter. To my surprise, much of “To the End of the Land” simply failed to work its magic on me.
The aforementioned Ora is the mother of an IDF soldier. But Ora is no Everymom. She has one son by her husband, Ilan, and another by her husband’s best friend, Avram (although we learn of this only midway through the novel). For reasons unexplained, Ora’s husband has abandoned her more than once; at present, he’s off vacationing in Brazil with Adam, their older boy. Ofer, Ora’s son by Avram, is just about to finish his military service but has volunteered to stay on for a dangerous mission. Ora has a premonition that Ofer’s extended service may be a fatal mistake. To avoid the army’s “notifiers” coming to her door with news of Ofer’s death, Ora flees her Jerusalem home, grabs Avram in Tel Aviv and schleps him along on her Galilee ramble.
The novel has some compelling set pieces and is bookended by two outstanding examples. The first deals with Ora’s relationship with an Arab taxi driver, a beguiling character named Sami. But Sami unfortunately soon disappears from the book. The final set piece is a hallucinatory account of Ilan and Avram under attack on the Suez Canal during the first days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This scene is as vividly hair-raising as anything in Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now.” Between such scenes the novel is devoted to Ora’s domestic reflections. Some of this has a genuine poetry, for example: “The four of them come to life, and the kitchen itself, like a reliable old machine joins them in tracking Ofer’s movements, loyally running in the background, humming with the quiet commotion and the jingle of its unseen pistons and wheels. Listen to the soundtrack, she thinks. Believe in the soundtrack. This is the right tune: a pot bubbles, the refrigerator hums, a spoon clangs on a plate, the faucet flows, a stupid commercial on the radio, your voice and Ilan’s voice, your children’s chatter, their laughter – I never want this to end…” But too often Ora’s memories simply fail to engage. I mean, by the time I was learning how as an infant Ofer relished chewing and sucking his toes, I felt I was cornered at a cocktail party with the tipsy wife of the neighborhood bore. To make matters worse, there’s a coupling scene that will surely be nominated for one of those Bad Sex in Literature competitions. I’ll spare you.
As Grossman notes at the end of his text, “To the End of the Land” was nearing completion when the author’s son was killed in action in Israel’s war in Lebanon, in 2006. This fact, of course, gives the book a wrenching poignancy and makes a reviewer feel acutely guilty about finding fault. Yet my reading experience cannot be denied. The novel has some fine writing, and that’s no surprise. What did surprise me is how “To the End of the Land” so often sputtered and dragged.