Open Heart

This book stacks up about evenly with The Lover, not a magnificently brilliant work, but a solid (if overly long and a bit repetitive) novel about the unknowable nature of attraction and love.

What gets me about this book however is believability. I understand (I believe so anyway) the messages about the impossibilities of the soul and love as divided by Israel and India that Yehoshua is trying to convey, but unfortunately he succeeds too well in making his main characters unsympathetic. Benjamin 'Benjy' Rubin is too analytical (even in his selfishness) to be taken seriously as a protagonist. And the character of Dori, damn, what a curiously repulsive character she turns out to be. In essence an emotional parasite that feeds on whatever show more she finds, she is also one of the few literary characters whose physical description matches her true character: that of being an ugly, bombastic, simpleton that really doesn't deserve anything, let alone what this book characterizes as 'love' but is really more akin to obsessive attachment.

Similar to my thoughts on The Lover, I have to separate author from text. A.B. Yehoshua is a prick of the highest (or lowest) order who lambastes all Jews in the Diaspora from Israel, and I've long wondered whether these beliefs of his stem from actual conviction, or just from his desire to differentiate himself as an Israeli author and drum up a name for himself. He's been called an Israeli Faulkner but I think that's being quite generous. Where Faulkner's lucid, dream like descriptions were the result of his intuitive grasp of the mystic unknowability of the life in his own fictional creations (and probably drunkenness too), Yehoshua's seem to be the result of an overly flowery stylized perspective that is trying desperately to to disguise a long narrative with random seeming and at times just odd descriptions that are only tenuously important to the overall story.

So, all in all, by and by, whatever and whatever, I recommend this book with a warning. It's quite long but is entertaining if not quite so deep and profound as it purports itself to be. show less

Insightful depiction of an obsessive love in a competitive set of medical doctors in Israel.

Medical adultery novel about a junior doctor who becomes infatuated with his boss’s middle-aged wife during a trip to India.

Tedious writing, unrewarding reading. Other than psychologically credible characters, there is nothing this book had to offer.

Fiction, Sojourn in India (Varanasi, Mumbai) of Benjamin Rubin, an Israeli internist at a Tel Aviv hospital, Nature of human psyche, First published with the title: "Ha-Shiv`a Me-Hodu", Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah, 1994, First US edition, Garden City N.Y., Doubleday, 1995, 498 pp., translated by Dalya Bilu; First UK edition, London, Peter Halban, 1996; First Italian edition: Torino, Einaudi, 1997, translated by Alessandro Guetta and Elena Loewenthal, 473 pp.

ספר של ניגודים. ארוך, מנדנד, ועם זאת קריא. מתרחש בלונדון, הודו ותל אביב ועם זאת רומן חיפני פר אקסלנס. רומן למשרתות כתוב היטב עם קטעי פואטיקה שהוכנסו בכוח. בסופו של דבר אינו מתמודד עם השאלה - למה אנחנו בהודו?

Per il giovane medico israeliano Benji Rubin, il viaggio in India con il direttore amministrativo del suo ospedale e con la moglie di lui, rappresenta forse un'occasione che aprirà nuove strade alla sua carriera di aspirante chirurgo. Ma all'India Benji torna con un amore impossibile che sconvolgerà la sua vita: quello per una donna appena più giovane di sua madre, sposata, neppure troppo avvenente, la cui sua unica virtù sembra essere un enigmatico sorriso. All'inizio il giovane medico sembra innamorato più che di una donna in carne ed ossa, del mistero di quell'amore. Quello che lo attende è un lungo viaggio nella geografia di sentimenti e passioni che sembrano sfuggire ad ogni ragionevole tentativo di interpretazione.