The Lover
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“Sacks is an extraordinarily gifted writer.”—Washington Post
Unfolding during an invasion of Gaza, The Lover tells the story of an affair between a young Israeli soldier and a Canadian woman. The emotional realities of ideology and war begin to change the lovers, who undergo a parallel radicalization and deradicalization. This book is for anyone seeking a deeply embodied and empathetic account of the politics of love in Israel-Palestine
The story of Allison and Eyal unfolds primarily in Tel Aviv where Allie, a thoughtful and intelligent academic searching for a sense of where she belongs in the world, falls deeply and unexpectedly in love with a young Israeli doing his military service. Their love story is sensual, filled with pleasure, longing, fear, moments of deep connection, failures of communication, and ultimately, a quiet and devastating betrayal. Their romance has a rhythm private and unique to them: when he is away on military missions, they write love letters; when he returns home for weekends, they are entwined and inseparable.
Allie is embraced by Eyal’s family, and their acceptance is very important to her. But when Eyal returns home from an invasion of Gaza, to which he has a surprising emotional response, Allie has changed so radically that her betrayal of her lover feels both shocking and tragic.
The Lover is a provocative, immersive, gorgeously written love story reminiscent of Marguerite Duras’ classic novel. Both books portray a seductive love affair in a colonial setting, atmospheric and rich with foreign detail, that raises unsettling questions about inequality, conflict, intensity, war, and danger. At once beautiful and disturbing, propulsive and poignant, The Lover will entrance readers and hold them spellbound.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The heroine of Sacks's poignant second novel (after City of a Thousand Gates) revisits a summer romance with longing and the wisdom of hindsight. Allison, 35 and pregnant, discovers a dusty box while cleaning her Tel Aviv apartment. Its contents, which are revealed later in the narrative, trigger memories of an intense and emotionally complex relationship she had before she was married to her husband, Timor. Allison meets Eyal on a bus when she is 27, a graduate student about to return home to Canada after a semester in Israel, and he's a 19-year-old soldier in uniform and holding a rifle. Both, at this point, have come to accept the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a part of their daily lives. Eyal's closeness to his family prompts Allison to reconnect with her sister Erica, from whom she is somewhat estranged. Cultural differences and the age gap between the lovers also impact the relationship, and Sacks renders it all in sensual prose, as in this description of Eyal's first impression of Allison: "So sweet, so out of place. That's exactly what he wishes to be: out of place, out of here. Not part of the scenery but a person moving through it." It adds up to a tender, affecting portrait of a bygone love.
