The Remains of Love

August 12, 2013
The agony of death is supplanted by the challenges of family in Israeli writer Shalev’s (Late Family) fifth book. Hemda was the first baby born in a progressive kibbutz, raised with high expectations as her mother traveled the world raising money to support her. Now elderly, Hemda lies in a hospital in Jerusalem after a fall in her apartment; she revisits moments from her past, imagining that her parents are visiting her at her bedside. Instead, it’s her children who wait nearby, bringing their own issues: having missed her opportunity to have a second child, Dina wants to adopt, but her husband and her daughter think she’s deluded and refuse to participate; and Avner, after seeing a dying man at the same hospital where his mother is being treated, is obsessed with finding the man’s grieving partner. Shalev captures both the stuffy claustrophobia of the hospital and the abyss of possibility outside as Hemda’s health problems force her children to reckon with their legacies and change what they can. The author’s long, internal-facing paragraphs amplify the drama and allow each of the Horovitzes to have a say as they face an uncertain future without Hemda’s influence.

October 15, 2013
Two siblings ponder radical changes to their lives--emphasis on the pondering--in the face of their mother's imminent passing. Shalev's latest novel (Thera, 2010, etc.) alternates among three perspectives of a Jewish family in Jerusalem. Hemda, at death's door, recalls her upbringing on a kibbutz and heavy-handed treatment by her father in dreamlike prose. She receives regular visits by her son and daughter, but the two have issues of their own. Avner is a lawyer who defends people on the wrong side of the Israeli bureaucracy, which is to say he often loses, and he's increasingly wounded by his harridan wife. Dina, meanwhile, is in her mid-40s and dealing with a difficult tween daughter, yet she's hoping to adopt a son--much to the unhappiness of her husband, who'd anticipated a quiet middle age. Avner is thunderstruck by the woman caring for the dying man in the bed next to his mother's, which leads to a series of misadventures as he tries to locate her. There, and in Dina's mournful paging through adoption websites, Shalev explores how we express affection and how we discover new reserves of it when all seems lost. Credit Shalev for not making a bluntly sentimental novel out of such themes. But it's an overlong and overwritten one, built on run-on sentences that moodily bear Avner's and Dina's emotions like slow-moving, sludgy rivers. Somewhat lost amid the siblings' crises is Hemda, who opens the novel with some potent observations about kibbutz life and the urge to please a parent, and her fuzzy state of consciousness seems to justify Shalev's woolly prose. But as Hemda becomes a mere plot device and symbol of how life goes on, that power dissipates. Intended as a careful meditation on love, it's mostly a somber and drowsy one.

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October 15, 2013
Lauded Israeli author Shalev tells the story of a family in turmoil, brought together in Jerusalem where the mother lies dying in a hospital bed. Hemda, the matriarch in her final days, remembers painful and touching moments from her life as a young girl on a kibbutz. Avner, the prodigal son, has become overweight and dull, but a fleeting moment with a woman he meets at the hospital infuses him with hope. Dina, the forgotten daughter, struggles to love her own teenage daughter in a way she was never loved by Hemda. Like Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984), the story unfolds through the voices of different family members of several generations. Shalev's writing is dense and slow-going, however, and while she is wise in the ways of the human subconscious, it is often difficult to distinguish reality from the life of the mind.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)