Zeruya Shalev: "Late Family (Terra)"

Zeryua Shalev is an Israeli writer who gained critical acclaim after publishing the novel Love Life, which was translated into more than 25 languages (the Polish translation from the original Hebrew language appeared in 2003). With Love Life she started a trilogy which was completed with the publication of Late Family in 2005, available now on the Polish book market in a beautiful hardcover edition.

Shalev's three novels are all written in the form of internal monologue of the protagonist who is always at a critical point of her life. First, in Love Life, the woman, infatuated with her father's childhood friend - a man twice older than she - lets her marriage fall apart by pursuing the erotic adventure. The sensuous prose, quite daring erotic scenes and the humiliation that she experiences during her sexual romp make the book an exciting journey into the mind of a woman who seems to be deranged with, well, a destructive passion. At that time Zeruya Shalev was sometimes compared to Erica Jong. The second novel of the trilogy, Husband and Wife, explores what happens in a marriage after twenty years of life in apparent security and comfort. The health crisis of the husband, who wakes up one morning and is unable to move, turns out to be a symptom of the crisis that the couple has been going through for some time. Brutally honest in her scrutiny of the protagonist's motives and most intimate thoughts, Zeruya Shalev offers again a disturbing narrative which some readers might even find too disturbing to go through.

Finally, in Late Family the readers are witnessing a personal crisis of a woman who decides to break up her family and leave her husband to search for freedom and independence. In its depiction of doubts and emotions of the protagonist, who yearns to go back to the security of her obnoxious marriage the moment she realizes that her dream of independence has come true, the narrative probes into the complexity of the psyche and the puzzling motives behind people's decisions. The novel ends with the protagonist landing in a new relationship which she wants to build because she has fallen in love. Since each of the prospective partners has a child or children, the new family is a very fragile and precarious construct when you look at it, and it is doubtful whether the woman will ever be able to feel as secure as she did with her reliable and predictable ex-husband.

Being such an honest analysis of a woman's psyche, the novel does not leave its readers with an obviously positive ending. There are a few nagging questions that arise after the reading is completed: Is this all desire to be independent in life just a naive dream, a fiction created by those who are bored with the routine - but also safety - of marriage? Is there any alternative to the normative pattern of life (that is marriage) that could be satisfying, or are people made in such a way that a solitary existence scares them to death and makes them pursue anybody willing to share life with them, maybe only because they are scared as well? It is because of the ability to pose such questions that I find the novel so brilliant.

P.S. Here is an interview with Zeruya Shalev in which she reveals her political views (something she never does in her novels) and where you can find out some facts from her life, career and learn about an injury which she incurred in a terrorist attack.