Written on the body

Samir El-youssef is struck by David Grossman's Lovers and Strangers, two intriguing novellas set in the Middle East

Lovers and Strangers translated by Jessica Cohen

by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen
264pp, Bloomsbury, £14.99

David Grossman is one of Israel's best writers at conveying an accurate assessment of public mood in his own country, yet in Lovers and Strangers, politics is so remote that one is led to assume that the narrated events are taking place against an otherwise totally uneventful background. What makes this more curious is that the two novellas in the book, "Frenzy" and "Her Body Knows", were written in February 2002 and June 2001 respectively, when violence in Palestine and Israel reached its bloodiest stages.

"Frenzy" is the story of Shaul, a brilliant university lecturer who travels in the night across Israel, possessed by the thought that his wife is having an affair with another man. The novella consists largely of Shaul's reflections and fantasies. Little punctuation is used and the distinction between direct and indirect speech is often blurred, as if language is meant to be a material embodiment of the fervent mood of the supposedly deceived husband.

"Her Body Knows" is the story of Rotem, a writer who's been living in London for years and returns to Israel desperate for a reconciliation with her ailing mother, Nili. Fiction, in the form of a story that Rotem writes and then reads to her mother, seems to be the only means of communication between them.

Grossman is too good a writer to be content with illustrating psychological crises. His characters are not left to indulge in self-pity and resentment; the narrative progresses to be more like a liberating performance. Each of the characters imagines and tells a story by which truth is approximated and meaning is reached. Shaul starts his story by complaining about his wife's infidelity but gradually ends up questioning the wisdom of monogamy; the erotic and voyeuristic fantasies of an obsessively jealous husband are replaced by an attempt to familiarise himself with the life that his wife shares with her lover and also the acceptance of her happiness without him: "It's as if she were born for him, he says with indescribable effort, and feels contaminated and miserable and yet freed in a way he has never felt before."

The narrative in "Her Body Knows" is even more of an act of emancipation. Here we have two parallel stories, one supposedly real and the other fiction. In the first, Rotem sits by Nili's deathbed, reading a story in which Nili, a middle-aged yoga teacher with a flamboyant past, is introduced to a disturbed teenager whom she tries but fails to help - an incident that deeply affects her life and causes a rift between her and her daughter. In turning what had happened to Nili into a story, Rotem produces a reconciliatory tale which leads to a resolution between them.

These intriguing stories don't inform us about the current situation in the Middle East, but they make us passionately aware that, contrary to the prevalent assumption in the west, political violence does not determine everything in the lives of people there. Samir El-youssef is co-author (with Etgar Keret) of Gaza Blues (David Paul). To order Lovers and Strangers for £13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian bookshop on 0870 836 0870.

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