One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset
A Novel
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar
At age thirty, Elish Ben Zaken has found himself in a life he never imagined. As a university student, Elish was an esteemed rock-music critic for local newspapers; now, disenchanted with an increasingly commercialized music scene, he has joined a private investigation agency where he is content to be a “clerk of small human sins”—a finder of stolen cars and wayward husbands. But when a disconcertingly amiable detective asks him to look into the suicide of an infamous philosophy professor—and the police file contains an unexpected allusion to Dalia Shushan, a celebrated young rock singer whose recent murder remains unsolved—Elish’s natural curiosity is piqued. And when violence begins to dog the steps of his investigation, he knows that dangerous secrets are at hand. Haunted by the ghost of Dalia, a true artist with a transformative voice whose dark brilliance Elish was one of the first to recognize, he must face the long-buried trauma of his own past in order to unravel the intertwining threads of two lives, and their ends.
In Elish, Shimon Adaf has created an unforgettable protagonist. A former philosophy student with a questing mind, born to Moroccan parents and raised in an outlying town, he is an eternal outsider in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. Equally, One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset is a detective novel unlike any other: an incisive portrait of a man and a city, and a meditation on disappointment, on striving for beauty and for intensity of experience, and on the futile desire to truly know another person.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The engaging first volume in Adaf's Lost Detective trilogy, published simultaneously in Greenspan's translations, introduces brilliant but haunted Tel Aviv private eye Elish Ben Zaken, a former philosophy student, essayist, and Israeli rock critic. After Dalia Shushan, the moody singer for a rock duo, is found shot to death, Elish, 30, reflects on his brief encounter and instant connection with Dalia at Sapir College in the Negev. Complicating things, Yehuda Menuhin, the infamously predatory professor at Tel Aviv University for whom Dalia had more recently been a teaching assistant, has apparently died by suicide following Dalia's death. Chief Superintendent Manny Lahav, head of investigations for the local police precinct, asks Elish to investigate the suicide as a suspected murder. Emotional insights and flashbacks to Elish's youth are sinuously written and movingly translated in lyrical prose, and Adaf ably ties up the plot's tangled complications. More than a mystery, this is a dark and yearning portrayal of Tel Aviv and the southern cities. Readers will eagerly turn to the next two installments.
