Rhyming Life And Death

Description

The novel centres around 8 hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a literary celebrity in his forties, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. On the way he stops at a cafe where he 'bumps into' some of his own characters. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions ('Why do you write? Do you write with a pen or on a computer?) have come and gone - he weaves stories round the audience and the panel. Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader for a drink before walking her home.It turns out she lives just opposite, so she goes home and he wanders off into the night. But he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to the flat, where she lives alone with her cat - and they have a brief but steamy sexual skirmish. Or is this merely a middle-aged writer's fantasy? We never quite know where reality ends and invention begins. He spends the rest of the night wandering, smoking, inventing, regretting and thinking till dawn.

Promotion info

Reality and fiction blend in an ingenious Rothian short novel from the celebrated author of A Tale of Love and Darkness - witty but elegiac, playful and sexy but somehow deadly serious, it's about a bored writer who goes to a reading and has a brief sexual skirmish with a female reader. Or does he?

Author description

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over 30 languages, most recently his brilliant semi-autiobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize and the Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lives in Arad, Israel.