Pain

September 1, 2019
A middle-aged woman confronts her first love. As a teenager, Iris meets the love of her life: Eitan, a thin, gangly boy caring for his sick mother. They plan to get married, but after Eitan's mother dies, he tells Iris he can't see her anymore--she reminds him too much of his grief. Thirty years later, Iris is married, with two children, and principal of a rigorous Jerusalem school. She is 10 years past a terrible injury sustained when a suicide bomber blew up a bus, but she is still haunted by pain. Iris' relationship with her husband, Mickey, is tepid, and her feelings for her children are clouded by disappointment: They aren't the children she'd have had with Eitan, after all. Then, unexpectedly, Iris runs into Eitan, and all the passion her life has been lacking rushes back. Shalev's (The Remains of Love, 2013, etc.) latest novel to appear in English is primarily concerned with the nature of that passion. Should Iris go back to Eitan, or should she stick with the life she's built? While she's trying to decide, that life seems to be splintering: Any day now, her son is due to be drafted, and her daughter seems to have fallen under the sway of a charismatic, cultlike leader. Shalev's depiction of Iris' tortured, conflicting thoughts is convincing, if claustrophobic. We're stuck in Iris' mind for the duration of the novel, and the result can feel somewhat stifling. Then, too, since the novel begins at a high pitch, as it goes higher and higher, the prose starts to feel hyperbolic. Shalev is a vivid and impassioned writer, but her latest novel, by its end, seems both airless and overheated.

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September 30, 2019
Shalev’s exhausting fifth novel (after Love Life) rides “waves of pain... drawing the map” of the lives of Iris, survivor of a Jerusalem bomb attack, and her damaged family. Confronting the return of pain from her old injuries, which coincides with the return of her childhood sweetheart Eitan, Iris, a dedicated school principal, must decide whether the life she has built since Eitan left her decades earlier is worth salvaging. Her husband, Mickie, who is obsessed with online chess, annoys her. Her son, Omer, though a handful as a child, no longer needs her. And her daughter, Alma, apparently caught up in the orbit of an exploitative guru, has moved to Tel Aviv. Charting Iris’s foray into infidelity and chronicling the increasing danger of Alma’s situation, the author heaps her characters’ grievances onto a pyre of discontent, until the story collapses into a tedious litany of physical, mental, and emotional suffering. Too earnest in her descriptions of love rediscovered, and drowning Iris in torment, Shalev sabotages her sometimes fine writing by long-winded, explanatory preaching. A pristine observation—“She was wrong, those weren’t nuts in her mouth, they were ice cubes”—is marred, for instance, by the paragraph of explanation that follows, exemplifying an overall fault of the book. This relentless exposé of affliction in all its iterations is undone by its lack of trust in its readers.

October 1, 2019

Injured in a terrorist bombing ten years earlier, Iris, a school principal living in Jerusalem, finds her chronic pain returning just as she's feeling alienated from her family. Her marriage has grown stale, her daughter, Alma, has moved to Tel Aviv, and her son will soon be inducted into the army. A search for relief from her pain leads her to a chance meeting with her first love, Eitan, and she rushes headlong into an affair. When Alma's problems encroach on her idyllic romance, can Iris remain true to her revived younger self and still help her daughter and perhaps heal her family? Anyone picking up a book titled Pain should expect a fair amount of anguish, and the book has little joy or levity. Even the headiness of the affair is shadowed by Iris's despair over her family troubles and regrets over losing the years she could have had with Eitan if they hadn't parted when they were young. VERDICT Essentially a midlife crisis novel with a lot of meditation over choice and chance and how they impact what follows, this story by Shalev (The Remains of Love) effectively depicts contemporary Israeli life but is a bit of a downer.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2019
After her oblivious husband asks, Remember today's date? physical pain and emotionally wrenching retrospection swamp Iris, a successful school principal. Exactly ten years earlier she survived a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, then endured surgeries that had sewn, screwed and implanted her together again. On this anniversary, excruciating pain returns. Visiting a pain specialist, she encounters her first love, the man who abandoned her at 17, a shock that had put her into a near-coma for weeks. She has been on hold for him in her heart for almost three decades. Fevered and laced with painkillers, Iris experiences intimate reconnections with Eitan that verge on fantasy. She wrestles with the pointlessness of life, the ambivalence she feels toward her children and husband, and the allure of a second chance at life with "PAIN," the name that appears when her returned lover texts or calls. Weaving a complex meditation on the intricate ripples of cause and effect in our lives, Israeli author Shalev (The Remains of Love, 2013) explores how each of us is both wounded and wounding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)