Oz, A: The Hill of Evil Counsel

Annamaria Amik a dat nota:

FRAGMENTS ON THE ANATOMY OF PASSION. Oz sets an accurate diagnosis of passion that takes such colorful forms in the lives of the characters of this epistolary novel, but also in the social strata they represent. Each of them is rewarding material for (psycho)analysis: Ilana, whose brilliance is only surpassed by her sentimentality; Alex, an expert on fanaticism who successfully hides his own vulnerability from his ex-wife behind the shell he created for himself as a scientist; Michel, a perplexing combination of the likeable step-father and fanatic; Boaz, a calculating teenager who sees his parents’ relationship with a surprising acuity and undergoes the most spectacular transformation in the novel; Rachel, Ilana’s kibbutz-dweller sister, a secondary character whose virtues emphasize the main characters’ virtues; Manfred Zackheim, the lawyer for whom client-attorney privilege is just a guideline he can easily pair with his own interests. And then there’s the country. Israel in the 70s. Painted in as many colors as this rich palette of characters can bring: a space of almost unbearable beauty, in Ilana’s letters; a world of secular science reflecting on historical events, in Alex’s; a place of appealingly solid values, shown in the second husband’s missives, where fanaticism slowly breaks through the cracks; locus pacis in Rachel’s kibbutz; and a place of countless opportunities in the teenager Boaz’s life. And not surprisingly, a realm of suspicious real estate transactions and (im)moral ambiguity in the lawyer’s communications. And then there’s the black box. The whole set of the letters, the novel itself. Just like the black box on airplanes, it records the most intense moments of life and is often the only “survivor” of disasters. Also Pandora’s box, from which, once opened, all the pain, torment, suffering come out. Oz’s black box, the whole of the letters and confessions, tries to decipher the secrets of relationships undergone disaster, perhaps for the same reason why this device is built into an aircraft: to use the information salvaged from tragedies in order to avoid future disasters. And then there’s the “truth”. Even one unreliable narrator can make a novel gripping, but here we have many unreliable narrators who each voice different versions of the same fictitious truth and allow razor sharp characterization. Oz’s main virtue is that he paints an extraordinarily nuanced portrait of each of the participants to the network of complex relationships. His technique masterfully illustrates that what we see as the objective truth is, in fact, nothing more than a framework on which the polychromatic interpersonal relationships weave subjective stories.