Be My Knife - Hardcover

Grossman, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747549524 ISBN 13: 9780747549529

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2002

Synopsis

Physical description; 307 p. ; 24 cm. Other titles; She-tehi li ha-sakin. English. Notes; Translated from the Hebrew. Summary; 'We could be like two people who inject themselves with truth serum, and at long last have to tell it - the truth I want to be able to say to myself, "I bled truth with her," yes, that's what I want. Be a knife for me, and I, I swear, will be a knife for you.' An awkward, neurotic seller of rare books writes a desperate letter to a beautiful stranger whom he sees at a class reunion. This simple, lonely attempt at seduction begins a love affair of words between Yair and Miriam, two married, middle-aged adults, dissatisfied with their lives, yearning for the connection that has always eluded them - and, eventually, reawakened to feelings that they thought had passed them by. Their correspondence unfolds into an exchange of their most naked confessions: of desire, childhood tragedies, joys, and humiliations. Through the dialogue between Yair - a family man and surprisingly successful adulterer, whose guarded letters reveal a life of duplicity - and Miriam, at first deceptively open and warm, who fills her life with distraction to avoid a past full of painful secrets, "Be My Knife" explores the nature and the limits of intimacy. Subjects; Class reunions - Fiction. Midlife crisis - Fiction. Adultery - Fiction. Modern fiction. LITERARY CRITICISM / African. Genre; Diary fiction. Epistolary fiction. Novel.

About this title

Review:

Be My Knife is the fifth novel by the highly acclaimed Israel novelist David Grossman, in which he explores the perennial dilemma of unrequited love. However, Grossman is far too original a novelist not to give his story a twist. The book opens with a letter written by Yair Einhorn, a neurotic, compulsive rare-book dealer, to Miriam, a beautiful, mysterious woman he glimpses "at the class reunion a few days ago--but you didn't see me". Her offhand gesture and brief, enigmatic smile makes him send her a passionate letter, what he calls a "restrained suicide note". To his joy and amazement, she writes back to him, and so begins an extraordinary love affair by letter, recounted for the first 200 pages by Yair's impulsive, impassioned and angst-ridden letters to Miriam. When Miriam finally finds her own voice towards the end of the book, Yair has raised the reader's expectation so high that ultimately her character is rather disappointing. Be My Knife is a novelist's novel about obsession, compulsion and desire. The writing is dense, demanding, and full of moments of great poetry and inventiveness, but at times it can become difficult and obscure. Stylistically Grossman is experimenting with plot and character in the grand modernist tradition, and Yair is reminiscent of the tormented "little men" in Joyce and Beckett. However, at times Grossman's brilliant artfulness overwhelms a potentially fascinating story. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"A transformative work of art...As the love affair moves toward its denouement certain passages demand to be reread, as if one can't believe the pure, intuitive truth they contain." --The New York Times Book Review

"Be My Knife may be the strangest, saddest love story ever told...exciting...exquisite [and] piercingly sad." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A beautiful and searing book...Grossman's prose is bewitching....Be My Knife starts as a slow, lyrical work, then draws the reader into Yair and Miriam's compulsions. For Grossman, love is as an obsession, a consuming and searing mirage, where lovers reveal what is raw and painful." --The Denver Post

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0747549524
• ISBN 13: 9780747549529
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320