I have been fascinated with the writing process as of late and the idea behinds this book fascinated me.Eight hours in the life of the Author with all his inner thoughts and character creations laid out before your eyes. All the events may be part of the Authors reality, his characters, or a fantasy, you'll have to guess. It's like being part of theAuthor's innermost thoughts even fleeting ones. I found it fascinatng. QuotesSometimes he included a short epitaph for someone who was dead and forgotten except in the occassional thoughts of a child or grandchild, and even this memory was ephemeral because, with the death of the last person who remembered him, the subject of the poem would die A second and final death p 52if only he could say to her, Listen, Rochele, please don't be sad, after all, the characters in this book are all just the Author himself: Ricky, Charlie, Mr.Leon, Ovadya, Yuval, Yerucham, they are all just the Author and whatever happens to them here is really only happening to him, and even you, Rochele, are just a thought in my mind and whatever is happening to you and me is actually only happening toe. P. 84Actually, the angry teacher or deputy head of department Dr. Pessach Yikhat was quite right when he stood up at the end of the evening and declared furiously that one of the roles of literature is to distill from misery and suffering at least a drop of comfort or human kindness. How to pit it: to lick our wounds, if not to dress them. At the very least literature should not preen itself on mocking us and picking at our wounds, as modern writers in our days do ad nauseum. All they can write is satire, irony, parody (including self-parody), vicious sarcasm, all steeped in malice. In Dr. Pessach Yikhat's view they should have this fact pointed out to them and they should be reminde of their responsilities. 103 ( )

This slim, inventive novel covers an 8-hour period in which a well-known author (referred to, simply, as the Author) participates in a reading from his recently published book. All the while, the Author concocts fictional personalities and stories about the real people he encounters during the course of the evening. Two men in a café, observed as the Author eats a pre-reading omelet, become “a gangster’s henchman” and his “agent of sorts, or perhaps a hairdryer salesman.” The waitress is cast in a week-long romance with “the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team.”

During the reading and afterwards, as the Author walks the city until 4 a.m., his stories spin out into ever greater layers of complexity and interrelatedness, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Through it all, the Author questions why he writes and discovers his art has become his only connection to the world:
"[H]e continues to watch them and write about them so as to touch them without touching, and so that they touch him without really touching him. … He is covered in shame and confusion because he observes them all from a distance, from the wings, as if they all exist only for him to make use of in his books. And with the shame comes a profound sadness that he is always an outsider, unable to touch or to be touched …."

Rhyming Life & Death is an interesting conceptual novel. Oz’s deconstruction of the creative process is unsettling because it reveals just how quickly we, the readers, will adopt a story line as a kind of “reality,” at least with respect to the protagonist. While this book’s cerebral pleasures are many, its emotional resonance falls flat. It’s difficult to care much about the Author’s roughly-drawn characters and sketchy stories, making Rhyming Life & Death more of an engaging philosophical exercise than a novel. ( )

Rhyming Life and Death is the latest novel by the acclaimed Israeli novelist, public intellectual and peace activist Amos Oz. This was a short novel, and I thought it would be a good introduction to Oz's work.

The events take place on one evening, in which the Author attends a public reading of his latest book. While a literary critic discusses his work and a woman reads from his book, he gazes out onto the audience, and creates stories about several people he see, along with a waitress at a cafe, that appear throughout the book. He also appears to have a relationship with the reader of his book, but there are several distinct episodes, and one is never sure where reality ends and fantasy/fiction begins. It was a moderately interesting and amusing exercise, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for or expecting. ( )

Visit my website Jew Wishes for my full review. http://jewwishes.wordpress.com/2009/0...

The book is a fascinating look at writing, life and death, fantasy and reality, and the comparison of how opposites need each other in order to complete the whole. The protagonist is known as The Author, and we never learn his true name. The use of third person narration is subjective in Rhyming Life & Death.

This form of narration affords us to be inside the mind of The Author, and we know his thoughts and feelings. This format is perfect for the novel, in that it exposes the immediate train of thought of The Author. He is a man who is bored with the task at hand (before it even begins), that of having to attend a literary event where there will be a reading of his work, and he will speak and answer questions regarding his writing.

I won’t go into the descriptions of the characters The Author develops, as the book is a slim volume, and I would give the entire story away. Suffice it to say that there are some interesting individuals in the story, and there are both humorous and poignant moments. Oz is incredible with his vivid and detailed imagery, leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination.

The Author’s stories are just that, stories, and most do not have a plot, but are a form of amusement for him. There is a often a fine line between reality and fantasy, and in Rhyming Life & Death, it is often difficult to separate the facts from the imaginary. They often seem as one, and at times it appears that the characters seemingly have taken on a life of their own, within The Author’s mind.

OZ has done it again. In my opinion Rhyming Life & Death is a powerful book (although some might not think so, as it can seem disjointed), and one that is an illumination on writing and on reading, and on life and death. It is almost as if Oz is assailing or ridiculing writing itself, or at least the process of writing and being published, and the effects of the endeavor, both during and after. That is the beauty of Amos Oz, his ability to infuse the absurd within the pages, to leave beginnings with no endings, and yet brilliantly show that clarity of mind can coexist with one’s imagination. “Once in a while it is worth turning on the light to clarify what is going on“. ( )