As the novelist Lore Segal famous in The Times Book Review, Molkho, whereas his spouse remains to be drawing breath, has his eye on his widowed authorized adviser as a “post-mortem possibility” and spends the remainder of the novel in encounters with different autopsy potentialities.
Mr. Yehoshua received the National Jewish Book Award for fiction with “Mr. Mani” (1992), which traces the wanderings of six generations of the Sephardic Mani household by essential durations of Jewish historical past. Each of its 5 chapters consists of the dialogue of a single speaker who’s telling a narrative to a different character, with that listener’s lacking responses implied within the first character’s remarks. To complicate issues, the novel proceeds backward in time.
Though evocatively set in Israel, Mr. Yehoshua’s novels are laced with themes that join them to the up to date Western canon. (Mr. Bloom included “A Late Divorce” in a copious checklist of works that make up, in his view, that canon). As the critic Jerome Greenfield wrote in 1979: “In the existential despair, the pessimism, the sense of dislocation and alienation that pervade his work, Yehoshua establishes a bridge between modern Israeli writing and a dominant stream of some of the best Western literature of our age.”
Saul Bellow known as Mr. Yehoshua “one of Israel’s world-class writers.” His books had been translated into 28 languages. He received the Israel Prize, awarded yearly by the state for vital cultural contributions, and in 2005 he was shortlisted for the primary Man Booker International Prize, then given for a whole physique of labor.
“In one movement of his imaginative wings,” Mr. Grossman, the Israeli novelist, wrote of Mr. Yehoshua in an electronic mail, “he would show us just how banal and absurd, just how the reality — especially of ours, in Israel — is surrealistic.”
Some critics noticed Mr. Yehoshua’s novels and brief tales as allegories for his jaundiced view of Israel’s insurance policies towards the Palestinians. Others dismissed such interpretations. In a assessment of “A Late Divorce,” Walter Goodman, a Times critic, wrote that the novel’s Israeli characters, “use money, sex, food, humor, affection, cruelty to hold onto each other, to punish each other,” and that the novel “has nothing to do with the West Bank.”
