To the End of the Land [Rauer Buchschnitt] [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

David Grossman's new book, in hebrew titled Isha Borachat M'besora, translates literally as "A Woman Escaping From a Message." In Israel, the connotation of the word besora (message) acutely depicts the nightmare that the book's protagonist, Ora, is trying to escape: soldiers knocking at her door at 3 a.m. with the besora that her son has been killed in war.

The catalyst for Oras journey - outlined in many other reviews here, is her attempt to escape her greatest fear, what she describes as the "nationalization" of her family--that Israel is coming to claim her son's life. Ofer was hers for twenty years, and now Ora must pay her dues.

Israel is a country that historically has dictated the nationalization of private emotions. It is a country where the culture of remembrance unifies and takes ownership over the dead. We - Israelis - mourn the loss of "our" fallen, and say kaddish (a prayer for the dead) for "our" sons. Society becomes a grieving "family," known in Hebrew as Mishpachat Hashchol. Publicly expressed grief becomes the language of the masses and the soundtrack of the nation.

Very few books in Israeli literature have so bravely dealt with the looming fear of death that surrounds Israeli society. Grossman does this so vehemently that it is hard to separate his bravery as an author from his bravery as a father who lost a son in the Second Lebanon War while writing this book. His message is unequivocal: the cost of living in Israel is that society is slowly losing its sense of normality.

Grossman spared no detail or emotion when he wrote this book. He did not leave one wound untouched or one fear forgotten. He evokes sadness in the reader, because the novel forces one to realize, at times, how abnormal life can be in Israel. He evokes hatred for his hero, Ora. She is controlling and paranoid. She makes every food that her son could dream of upon his return from the army, and her son hates her for that. She paces furiously, drives like a maniac, and panics at restaurants. She is every Israeli who goes to extremes to hold on to normality, and forgets what normality is.

When Ofer assuredly tells his mother that it is his responsibility as a soldier to die so that others won't, Ora's horror is difficult to internalize. While Israelis know, and for the large part accept, that they are required to sacrifice their lives for their country, to a non-Israeli reader, this is a difficult concept to comprehend.

It is abnormal to die for the land. It is abnormal to have an Arab taxi driver, a dear friend of Ora's, to drive her and Ofer to a meeting point where a war is being fought between their peoples. It is abnormal to calculate which seat on the bus is safest. It is abnormal to fear a 3-a.m. knock at the door. And it is abnormal to go through border controls when visiting family in Gush Etzion.

Necessary? Absolutely. This is the price that we are destined to pay.

Normal? No.

I admit: Living in Israel can be exhausting. Many times I ask myself: why do I put myself through this? I want to get up and leave, but can't. I am not sure where this inability comes from. A burning ideology? A fear of the unknown? Or a mere resignation--what is meant to be will be.

Rarely can a book change lives in the way that Grossman's book has. It is part of the price that he paid, with his son's death, and it is a gift that he has given us, so that we remember the cost of living, at least as much as we remember the cost of dying.

Ora, an Israeli mother, planned a Galilee backpacking trip with her youngest son, Ofer, to celebrate the end of his army conscription. But, like a fist through her soul, he signed up for a major offensive, another twenty-eight days. Barely holding her sanity together--her husband, Ilan, has trekked off to Bolivia with her oldest son, Adam--she flees from her fear of the "notifiers" (the government officials who deliver grave news) and leaves, anyway, sans cell phone and contact access.

Ora pleads with her reclusive old friend and former lover, Avram, erstwhile best friend to Ilan, to accompany her to the Galilee. She believes that, with Avram, they can form a thread that ties them to the land, to nature, to safety, to Ofer, and weave a tapestry that protects him from peril. With Avram, she can magically keep Ofer alive. No one else can extinguish bad thoughts and assist her to defy fate.

"...she was always easy with Avram, letting him see all of her, almost from the first moment she met him, because she had a feeling, a conviction that there was something inside her, or someone, perhaps an Ora more loyal to her own essence, more precise and less vague, and Avram seemed to have a way to reach her."

Years ago, Avram and Ilan were soldiers together, and the story explains how Avram lost his artistic spirit and love of words and suffered permanent damage and a death of the soul. As they hike, climb and acclimate to the wild terrain, Ora recapitulates the story of her family--the details of raising her sons and her forsaken marriage to Ilan. The germination and withering of the friendship between Ora, Avram, and Ilan is recounted in flashbacks and threaded into her story as a wife and mother.

The following quote refers to Ora talking to Ofer when he was only a few hours old:

"It surprised me how simple the story was when I told it to him. That was the first time (and probably the last) that I was able to think about us that way. The whole complication that was us, me and Avram and Ilan, all of a sudden became one little unequivocal child, and the story was simple."

The reader clings to the tensile wire of a mortal coil that underscores this hefty opus. Ora is beseeching the universe to keep Ofer alive while simultaneously striving to rescue Avram's spirit. The secrets and treacheries they share and their separate and private agonies are knotted together, and the frayed but enduring fibers unwind and snap through the story.

Grossman is an eloquent and assiduous writer of internal struggle and emotional combat. He leaves no stone unturned, and the reader is saturated with Ora's psyche on every page. I was sometimes exhausted with the relentless, strenuous tone of his narrative. The surplus verbiage and chronic turmoil drowned his beautiful nuances and periodically made reading a chore. Ora's self-indulgence struck me as pretext for the author's prolixity.

However, there is abundant beauty and unbreakable heart to this story, which, while swollen at times, is never pompous. It is visceral and sometimes surreal, but much less stream-of-consciousness and magical realism than some of his previous novels purport to be. And, from Avram, there was often relief from Ora's tautology. The sections on him were full of delightful, clever word-play and ribald wit.

Aesthetically, the final, transcendent scene was painterly, exquisite, and delicate, recalling, for me, (in spirit, not in actual event) the elegance in the final scene of Kate Grenville's story of war, The Lieutenant. Grossman shakes the reader with the toll of war and the trials of raising a family. The burdens of choice, ambivalence, and fate linger on from one generation to the next.

This moving story has a loose, allegorical significance to Tolstoy's War and Peace and reworks the first line to Anna Karenina to remind us that all happy families are miserable in different ways.

When I finished To the End of the Land by David Grossman it was very difficult to review. Too many reviewers begin with plot summaries and those become tiresome after a while, especially when the plot itself is tiresome, so I avoid its retelling here. Although I did find the plot tedious, that is not to say it is without quality or intelligence. The plot is unique and masterfully written but the narrative structure which drives the plot, a narrative within a narrative, was for this reader arduous and exhausting.

On the whole this novel did not work for me but I cannot say that I did not like the book. There are aspects of its 600 pages that really engaged me and I found deeply poignant and valuable. However, I believe less is more in literature and that creative expression is much more exquisite and impressive with an economy of words. The overindulgence in the psyche of To the End of the Land's main character, a middle-aged Israeli woman named Ora, is overwrought and causes the pacing of the novel to falter. Any dramatic tension in the plot seems to get overwhelmed or even lost in the author's prolonged verbosity.

The novel does have its arresting moments of beautiful eloquence and stunning imagery but it is strenuous reading to find those hidden literary gems. They are buried deep within Ora's stream-of-consciousness inner dialogues and contemplative programming which are dull, repetitious and tedious. I felt trapped and suffocated inside Ora's head. Nor could I warm up to her character. I found her too narrow, too self-absorbed, too boring. Ora carries a heavy burden of secrets, guilt and fear on her back as well as overpowering maternal instincts, profound love for her two sons, Adam and Ofer, and an enormous passion for each of her two best friends and lovers, Ilan (also her estranged husband) and Avram. That's quite a lopsided load for her character to bear and there are many agonizing emotional moments of tears, wailing, gnashing of teeth, even crawling into the earth with grief. Yet somehow she never engages me and her grief does not generate a true sense of loss or despair but rather a banal sense of melodrama which draws little to no empathy.

There are anecdotal elements of various historic events involving the State of Israel which come into play in the telling of the story, elements providing thrust and significance to the plotting, which I, being a non-Jew, found insightful if one-sided. However, as moving as the effects of these events are to the Israeli people as reflected in the telling of To the End of the Land, especially at the hand of such a master writer as David Grossman, I still felt somewhat manipulated into taking a political position I did not care to assume. That kind of manipulation actually turns me off as a neutral reader but still I appreciate the life that Grossman has breathed into his characters. I was particularly moved by the characterization of the Arab-Israeli taxi driver named Sami who is introduced in the earlier part of the novel. I actually cared about him and was sorry his role was so limited in the story. There is very interesting interaction between Sami and Ora which I found moving and memorable.

Another fine quality of the novel which I particularly loved is the beauty of the Israeli landscape that Grossman so eloquently describes. The Galilean countryside is a healing panorama of poetry and peacefulness. In spite of the savagery of the wars and the conflicts, the hatred and the violence that have plagued it throughout history, the implacable beauty of the country still shines through to soothe the soul.

I also enjoyed Grossman's gift of eroticism. The lovemaking he describes is beautiful, sensual and never vulgar.

It is just too bad that Grossman focuses so much on Ora's psyche. I think I could have given this novel 4 stars without quite so much of it. I also found the very long winded, overly-detailed "secret" which Ora reveals to Avram word-for-word on their hike through the Galilee quite unbelievable in the telling and another turn-off.

I was also very disappointed with the novel's unresolved denouement which I found incomplete and unrewarding after such an investment of my time and effort to struggle along with the bloated length of this novel.

But in spite of all I consider as its drawbacks, this novel is still an important one. As long as wars are being fought anywhere, sons and daughters will be killed, parents will be bereaved and families will suffer. To the End of the Land is an acknowledgement of this terrible grief and pain.

In that regard, I must say with all due respect to David Grossman, that I give this novel 4 stars rather than less because of his heart-wrenching final comments at the end of the book. Becoming aware that Mr. Grossman's son was killed in an attack on Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon while he was finishing this novel has certainly softened my heart. To realize that this novel is surely the outpouring of Mr. Grossman's grief for a son lost in a futile war makes To the End of the Land all the more poignant. I bless him and wish him comfort and peace.