Three Floors Up

Brilliant! Great plot, great ideas, wonderful writing, and brilliant structure. Three stories in a building, three people needing desperately to talk to someone who knows them intimately, and three parts of the psyche according to our old friend, Sigmund Freud. Set in Israel, this novel contains three riveting sets of human circumstance. Ultimately, it is revealed that "the three floors of the psyche do not exist inside us at all!Absolutely not! They exist in the air between us and someone else, in the space between our mouths and the ears we are telling our story to. "
What matters is that we talk to someone! Thirty years as a counselor, honored to be the ears hearing many, many human stories confirms this belief. There is something show more very powerful in the experience of being heard! I know it as I know my name. This book illuminates the reality of the deeply felt desire to be heard! Great read! show less

Not bad, but there wasn't enough of a connection between the three stories for it to coalesce into a solid narrative, it was more like three separate short stories/novellas that didn't get very far. The epistolary format also got a bit stale towards the end.

The translation seemed decent (I didn't compare to the original) with a few obvious errors (e.g. confusing angioplasty with angiogram) and some awkward slang, but the baffling decision to cast voice actors with strong Indian accents to play Israelis was discordant and jarring.

Three different stories, slightly related in that they are told by residents in the same Israeli apartment building. One from the POV of a man, the other two from women. The stories are marriage and family oriented. Very absorbing with ambiguous characters, trying to do the right things but not always succeeding.

Set in an upper-middle-class Tel Aviv apartment building, this best-selling and warmly acclaimed Israeli novel examines the interconnected lives of its residents, whose turmoils, secrets, unreliable confessions, and problematic decisions reveal a society in the midst of an identity crisis.

Well written book by an Israeli author about three different families living in an Tel Aviv apartment building. I would like to have read more about the first couple, the issues seem unresolved.

An excellent read. Haven't been so absorbed by a book in a long time.

Tra gli scrittori israeliani della generazione di mezzo, Eshkol Nevo, di cui ho già apprezzato ‘La simmetria dei desideri’ è tra i miei preferiti. Non avrà lo spessore di un Amos Oz o di un Yeoshua dei libri migliori, ma ha un piglio tutto suo, è brillante, intelligente, acuto nel descrivere i ‘tic’ della società israeliana, e non solo, di oggi. Questo è un libro sulla vulnerabilità e sulla fragilità di tutti e di ciascuno. E’ ambientato in un condominio di Tel Aviv, dove esistono relazioni di buon vicinato (come è la norma in Israele, dove il senso di comunità è maggiore che da noi), ma dove poi ognuno è solo con i suoi problemi, ora reali, ora immaginari, ora al confine tra reale e immaginario. Le storie show more raccontate sono tre, una per piano, e ognuna si rapporta a uno degli aspetti fondanti della personalità secondo la teorizzazione freudiana (es, io, super-io). Il presupposto teorico, che diviene chiaro ad un certo punto, non ingombra né appesantisce la narrazione, ma le fa da sottofondo. Complessivamente, una lettura scorrevole e non banale grazie anche alla traduzione che, questa volta, a differenza del libro precedente è di buon livello ovvero non reca offesa continua alla lingua italiana. show less