The Liberated Bride Pa - Softcover

Yehoshua, A. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156030160 ISBN 13: 9780156030168

Publisher: Mariner, 2004

Synopsis

Yochanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.

About this title

Review

PRAISE FOR THE LIBERATED BRIDE
"Yehoshua, the most daring of the major Israeli writers, tells a simple story about a region that complicates all it touches . . . [and] remains, somehow, hopeful."-The New Yorker
"The Liberated Bride is a magnificent, often comic, and humanely inexorable journey among Israel's Jews and their secret and denied sharers: the Arabs. . . .Yehoshua, who is 70 and a dove, has written a novel that incarnates the message to extraordinary literary effect." -The New York Times Book Review

From the Author

"When I began ['The Liberated Bride', in 1998], the peace treaty was in trouble but the breakthrough in Oslo was done, so my interest was in writing about our relationship with Israeli Arabs. ... This is a book about borders - how far can a father-in-law go behind his son's back to help him? What does a man say to his wife and what should he not say? What will be the frontier between us and the Palestinian state? For all our history as Jews we were crossing borders, it was Zionism that brought us back to the idea of having borders. After the six day war, the abolition of the border poisoned the two peoples. ... When the intifada started I didn't change the plan of the book because I didn't know that it would last so long and that it would have such a profound effect. The Arab Israelis were the main protagonists, not the Palestinians. It's very hard to describe an enemy from the inside but understanding the Arabs is the key to understanding ourselves, our crisis!
in the world and without solving it we will deteriorate."
(from an interview with Linda Grant, printed in The Guardian (Review), 31 January 2004)

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0156030160
• ISBN 13: 9780156030168
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576