FICTION: Rhyming Life and Death By Amos Oz, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange Chatto Windus, 148pp. £13
AMOS OZ is playing a joke on us here, in presenting this slim, rambling novel in follow-up to his monumental Tale of Love and Darkness.
Love and Darkness was a big book in every sense. It broke the bounds of the memoir form. Through a series of linked stories, Oz brought to life generations of his family and the lost world of eastern European Jewish civilisation, entwining this with the tale of his own Jerusalem childhood. In making history a personal story, Oz succeeded in portraying the Zionist dream in all its complexity and idealism – the yearning to transcend history and to begin anew in a promised land where persecution and victimhood would not exist. The tragedy is what this longing for purity becomes; the innocent dream transformed into a militarised state, its back to the sea, its people determined never again to show weakness before the enemy.
Love and Darknessmanages to be a beautiful book, because its political-historical dimension emerges as if incidentally. The real centre of the story is the author's boyhood in Jerusalem, ending with the suicide of his mother when he was 12 years old.
So what kind of joke is Rhyming Life and Death? Or what kind of a footnote is it to A Tale of Love and Darkness? One that opens with a series of questions about the act of writing itself: "These are the most commonly asked questions. Why do you write? Why do you write the way you do? Are you trying to influence your readers, and, if so, how? What role do your books play?" And so on, down to "How much, roughly, do you earn from each book?"
An unnamed writer – he is only “the Author” – is making a public appearance in a rather grubby cultural centre. The air-conditioning isn’t working. While a literary critic talks and the audience sweats, the Author is “totally immersed in his usual tricks” – he stops listening and, looking around at his audience, starts imagining their lives in vivid, cartoonish detail. Then a professional reader delivers several excerpts from the Author’s work. “Even the vitriolic dialogue that you wrote as though you were scattering shards of glass she reads with gentleness and feeling.” (Wishing to seduce her, the Author will later praise her for making his characters sound exactly as they sounded in his head when he wrote.) When the Author stands to speak, he says what is expected of him, “piling lie on lie”. Then there is the QA session, recalling the questions with which the book opened.
The Author then takes a long solitary nocturnal walk, imagining ever more complex scenarios for his new creations. But this show of skill with character and plot turns out to be empty display. We reach the final page to find that Oz has kept us hanging for nothing. Even the question posed at the start, “Why do you write?”, appears to be left floating.
And this is perhaps Oz’s way of answering that opening question, of underlining that the function of storytelling is to supply the form and coherence that life in its raw state is short on. The difficulty arises for the writer when he becomes aware of the provisional nature of this act, just as he is granted the role of provider of meaning. How do you play such a role without entering a lie?
While the literary critic delivers his address, the Author observes a teenage boy with bad skin, names him Yuval Dotan, guesses that he writes poetry, imagines his ambition and frustration, his wish to be, some day, the older writer he sees before him: “When he was sixteen or seventeen, the age that the young poet Yuval Dotan is now, the Author used to sit alone at night in an abandoned storeroom where he poured out fragments of muddled stories onto paper. He wrote more or less the way he dreamed or masturbated: a mixture of compulsion, enthusiasm, despair, disgust, and wretchedness. And in those days he also had an insatiable curiosity to try to understand why people hurt each other, and themselves, without meaning to at all.”
In other words, the writing comes from a failure to understand. And an odd situation arises when this turns you into a success. A way to address this feeling of falseness might be to write an extended meditation such as Rhyming Life and Death, to fill it full of characters who are in fact your readers, to create the expectation of resolution, and to abruptly walk away without providing one.
The Author, no matter how ingenious he is, still finds himself inhabiting the mystery of existence. He might, once, have found something godlike in his power to imagine, to bring coherent worlds into being, but now he finds, with a vague sense of shame, that the aesthetic escape is an escape like any other.
“Why do you write?” Because I inhabit a mystery, Oz seems to say, and I don’t know any more about it than you do.
If the audience doesn’t get the joke, delivered with such humility and gentleness, you probably don’t want it along anyway.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s most recent collection of short stories, The Pleasant Light of Day,has just been published by Penguin