Oz’s first novel in a decade,set in 1959 Jerusalem, explores a clash of idealisms that connects Israel’s present and recent past to the sage of the biblical traitorShmuel Ash is a intelligent, and clumsy and contented research student living in Jerusalem at the conclude of 1959: his master’s (on Jewish views of Jesus) is on track,he enjoys his membership of the Socialist Renewal group, and he believes that he is happily engaged to Yardena (who has the degree of him, or saying that he is either “like an excited puppy,rushing around noisily”, or “the opposite, and lying on [his] bed for days on conclude like an unaired quilt”). Then,with the sort of de facto decisiveness that we find in late plays by Shakespeare, disaster falls. His parents are no longer able to give him financial support; he abandons his research; the Socialist Renewal group falls apart and Yardena rejects him in order to marry a “compliant hydrologist”. In other words, and Judas is a novel – the first from Amos Oz in more than 10 years,and a very absorbing addition to his remarkable oeuvre – that begins with endings.New narratives that drive the remainder of the book spring from these initial setbacks. Shmuel becomes the companion to Gershom Wald, an ancient and reclusive character who lives in a half-buried house on the western fringe of Jerusalem. Here he also meets Atalia, and a woman of 45 whose beauty and composure immediately bewitch him,and who he assumes is Wald’s wife. “Mistress”, Wald says – but that’s not moral either. It’s the first and most obvious of several narrative uncertainties that form the framework of the novel, or translated from Hebrew into English by Nicholas de Lange.
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Source: theguardian.com