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Book Description
With Love Life, which The Washington Post Book World called "a brutally honest and often brilliant tour of individual and family psychology," Zeruya Shalev achieved international literary stardom. In her newest offering, Husband and Wife, she takes us into the heartbreak and compromise of a diseased marriage that may or may not be capable of healing. The quiet rhythms of the family life of Na'ama and Udi Newman suddenly screech to a halt when Udi, a healthy, active man, wakes up one morning unable to move his legs. The doctors can find no physical explanation for his paralysis, and soon it becomes painfully clear that it is a symptom of something far less tangible and far more insidious. This one morning sets in motion a series of events that reveals a vicious cycle of jealousy, paranoia, resentment, and accumulated injuries that now threaten to tear the small family apart. Na'ama, always intent on upholding the structure of her marriage regardless of its rotting foundation, is now forced to see it for what it is and deal with the consequences. In a rush of hallucinogenic imagery, Husband and Wife brilliantly captures the vulnerability and deceptive comforts of lives intertwined, as well as the near impossibility of setting out to disentangle them without any casualties. With this novel, Zeruya Shalev is sure to gain the renown here in the United States that she already enjoys around the world. "One puts the book aside convinced that no other novel could equal Zeruya Shalev's masterpiece."
-- Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Die Zeit (Germany)
From Publishers Weekly
Little occurs outside the racing mind of Na'ama Newman, the intensely thoughtful narrator of this second novel by Shalev (Love Life). Na'ama is a social worker who heals ailing young mothers and their children, though she is unable to turn an observant eye on the lives of her own husband and child, or herself. When her husband, Udi, a healthy hiking guide who periodically leaves the family for long, solitary jaunts into nature, wakes up one morning unable to move his legs, Na'ama begins an inner monologue, wrestling over whether to take him to the hospital, where she will surely have to share him and the blame for whatever ails him with nurses, doctors and the rest of the world, or whether to keep him at home, where she and their nine-year-old daughter Noga can finally have a constant relationship with him. As Udi lies in bed, Na'ama's thoughts crash against each other: she recalls a brief though damaging affair, the perfection of her and Udi's adolescent love, and the ways Noga has borne the brunt of their sour marriage. When Na'ama learns Udi is suffering from conversive paralysis, a sickness in which mental stress is expressed physically, she is wildly jealous of the illness, saying, "so that's what she's called, his new woman, conversion." Shalev, an Israeli literary editor, has created a novel entirely devoid of standard dialogue, choosing instead to convey snatches of conversation, arguments and whispers of love in stream-of-consciousness prose. Her language is hauntingly, painfully lyrical, and her understanding of the conflicted human yearning for connection and solitude astounds.
From Library Journal
Friends since childhood, Na'ama and Udi Newman married young and start having marital problems in midlife. Setting the downward spiral in motion is Na'ama, who meets a young artist at the local caf? and agrees to sit for a portrait. This turns into posing nude for him, and there is a hint of sexual dalliance. These issues come to a head when Udi wakes up one morning and can no longer feel his legs. After a thorough examination in the emergency room, doctors conclude that there is nothing medically wrong with him. Na'ama then learns about a young woman, Zohara, who practices Tibetan healing rituals, and contacts her to try to help her husband. In addition to these problems, Na'ama's ten-year-old daughter, Noga, struggles to fit in at school. Adding to this maelstrom, Na'ama has become emotionally involved with one of her charges at the hostel for unwed pregnant girls where she works. Written in a first-person, stream-of-consciousness style, this novel attempts to show what happens to a family when a 20-year relationship falls apart. Noted for her debut novel, Love Life, Israeli native Shalev plays confidently with the themes of jealousy, accumulated grievances, and resentments but, unfortunately, cannot infuse her characters with life. Only for larger collections with an interest in contemporary Hebrew fiction.
Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH
Book Dimension
length: (cm)21.6 width:(cm)14.5
