Lies, First Person
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
From the 2010 winner of the Best Translated Book Award comes a harrowing, controversial novel about a woman's revenge, Jewish identity, and how to talk about Adolf Hitler in today's world.
Elinor's comfortable life—popular newspaper column, stable marriage, well-adjusted kids—is totally upended when she finds out that her estranged uncle is coming to Jerusalem to give a speech asking forgiveness for his decades-old book, Hitler, First Person.
A shocking novel that galvanized the Jewish diaspora, Hitler, First Person was Aaron Gotthilf's attempt to understand—and explain—what it would have been like to be Hitler. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, while writing this controversial novel, Gotthilf stayed in Elinor's parent's house and sexually assaulted her "slow" sister.
In the time leading up to Gotthilf's visit, Elinor will relive the reprehensible events of that time so long ago, over and over, compulsively, while building up the courage—and plan—to avenge her sister in the most conclusive way possible: by murdering Gotthilf, her own personal Hilter.
Along the way to the inevitable confrontation, Gail Hareven uses an obsessive, circular writing style to raise questions about Elinor's mental state, which in turn makes the reader question the veracity of the supposed memoir that they're reading. Is it possible that Elinor is following in her uncle's writerly footpaths, using a first-person narrative to manipulate the reader into forgiving a horrific crime?
Gail Hareven is the author of eleven novels, including The Confessions of Noa Weber, which won both the Sapir Prize for Literature and the Best Translated Book Award.
Dalya Bilu is the translator of A.B.Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation. She lives in Jerusalem.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hareven's book starts with a disclaimer: "You should never believe writers, even when they pretend to be telling the truth. Everything... here is pure fiction." Not exactly big news in a novel, but when narrator Elinor says her lawyer husband insisted on this introduction, the reader's antenna goes up. Could the story be true? This is just one of the tricks Hareven (The Confessions of Noa Weber) gets up to. There's also the title: does it refer to lies told in the first person that is, by the narrator or those told by her father's cousin, the author of a novel within the novel told in Hitler's voice, titled, yes, Hitler, First Person. Aaron Gotthilf, Elinor's Uncle, has been punished for the book (bad reviews, banning, hate mail), but he's gone unpunished for repeatedly raping Elinor's older, more timid sister, Elisheva. The rapes more or less destroyed the Jerusalem-based Gotthilf family, precipitating breakdowns, suicide, and abandonment; that Elinor is a happily married columnist and her sister has made a new life in America seems almost miraculous. But Elinor's Eden is threatened when Aaron comes to Jerusalem to apologize (for the book, not the rape). Well translated, the novel is tart and testy, filled with insight into writers' ability to lie, omit, and fabricate.
