Ce très bon roman autobiographique mérite de trouver d'autres lecteurs.

Ce livre a fait une étape chez moi. Son voyage continue entre les mains de Over-the-moon.
Bonne lecture !

et le voilà chez moi, après une petite rencontre sympa. Merci Ydam!

Taking a break just over halfway through because I feel as if I've been reading this for ever. I started after Amos Oz died on December 28, 2018.

An amazing book - dense, intense, writhing with intimate and intricate details that require careful concentration. I am up to page 328 when Amos is about 12, but he wasn't even born by page 200... How can anyone remember so much, so vividly? It is very interesting to experience all the changes in Jerusalem during British rule, the changing relationship between the Arabs and Jews after WWII, as we explore the city street by street, even house by house. It inspires great admiration for the Jewish people, so erudite, brilliant linguists - people who can read in 17 or 18 languages.

Oz has a very distinctive style that involves a lot of repetition, the reason I didn't give 10 points, as I think style should be less obvious... But he is a master at expressing thoughts and emotions, and I'm eager to carry on to the end.

I found it was going so slowly that I stopped for a while and took some light relief in a romantic novel, Wideacre, which also had more than 600 pages that I whizzed through in a couple of days!

Finished at last! I sometimes felt overwhelmed and very small in the company of such accomplished and interesting characters, though Oz does say that he first found inspiration in the book Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (a worthwhile read) which describes the ordinary people of a small American town.

This tale of love and darkness spirals in ever decreasing circles around the main event in the narrator's life which is the death of his mother when he was 12. He refers to it over and over again but never explaining what happened till the apotheosis in the final pages, which are very poignant. Turning the last page I just wanted to sit quietly and not do anything for a while, just absorb the emotions.

I also found moving the account of his relationship with Orna when an adolescent and when he met up with her again (towards the end of the book).

On the whole it is very "dépaysant" (exotic not being a good translation of the word) and taught me a lot about life in Jerusalem; I also noted some unusual words: shchphzhenic Polish and yanikhatchnic Russian (are they real words?, p. 341.

Another note: it is translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange.

At present with a friend

Lors de la réunion

not taken at meetup so transferred to the boîte à livres in the phone box at terminus of buses 1 and 21