Be My Knife
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
'Impressive, extraordinary and exotic ... the finest novel to date by a writer who has been, for nearly two decades, one of the most original and talented not only in his own country but anywhere' New York Times Book Review
'Extraordinary ... lust, frailty and fear are all laid bare ... the peeling away of lies and social restraints to disclose the naked soul is gripping' Daily Mail
'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The spirit of the Polish-Jewish surrealist Bruno Schultz presided over Grossman's most celebrated novel, See Under: Love.The spirit of Kafka not Kafka the novelist, but Kafka the tortured man who wrote painful letters to his fianc e, Felice hangs over his newest one. Yair Einhorn is a neurasthenic Jerusalem bookseller, a married man and the father of a five-year-old son, who begins sending love letters to Miriam, a woman he briefly met at a party. He likes to take a magnifying glass to the spots upon his soul and yet he seems blind to his more callous habits, as when he tells Miriam that he destroys her letters. In the end, Yair has no intention of getting physically involved with Miriam. He wants, instead, to touch her through his imagination. In a telling phrase, Yair speaks of the "barbed temptations of reality" and so he has bottled his boldness within the limits of his language. Ultimately, this makes him less seducer than solipsist. Miriam's section of the novel is drawn from her notebook, in which she keeps up a private dialogue with Yair even after his letters stop. Her life is complicated enough without him. She lives with her lover, Amos, and together they are raising a boy who is probably the son of another woman, the now deceased former lover of both Amos and Miriam. In the brief third section, Yair and Miriam finally meet. Grossman's most enduring creation here is not Yair, who has Kafka's self-punishing attitude without Kafka's genius. It is Miriam, whose more concrete desires and less expansive linguistic flights reveal a complex, private middle-aged woman of surprising assurance and carnality.
