The Retrospective
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An ageing film director must face his past in the acclaimed Israeli author’s prize-winning novel—“a compelling meditation on art, memory, love [and] guilt” (Independent, UK).
Yair Moses, an aging Israeli film director, has been invited to the Spanish pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his work. Accompanied by Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, Moses discovers a painting in their hotel room that triggers a distant memory from one of his early films: a scene that caused a rift with his brilliant but difficult screenwriter—who, as it happens, was once Ruth’s lover.
Upon their return to Israel, Moses decides to travel to the south to look for his elusive former partner and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price that will have strange and lasting consequences. A searching and original novel by one of the world’s most esteemed writers, The Retrospective is a meditation on mortality and intimacy, on the limits of memory and the struggle of artistic creation.
Winner, 2012 Prix Médicis étranger
Winner, 2012 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Yehoshua's thoughtful but plodding new novel (after Friendly Fire), elderly Israeli director Yair Moses is a placeholder for the prolific author in a narrative that examines a life's work. The book begins with a retrospective of Moses's early films that forces him to relive his collaboration with screenwriter Shaul Trigano. A hotel room painting reminds Yair of a scene from their final collaboration, in which a nursing mother was to breastfeed a beggar. Ruth, the film's star and Shaul's soul mate, refused to play the scene, and Moses backed her decision, ending his collaboration with Shaul, as well as Shaul's relationship with Ruth, who would become Yair's occasional lover. She attends the retrospective with him, but their relationship is difficult, and watching old work forces the past to the fore. In the book's second part, Yair revisits the locations of those early films and concern over Ruth's health causes him to seek out Shaul. Their reunion sends Yair on a surreal penitential mission. In interviews, Yehoshua has mentioned Faulkner as an influence, and it shows. Some sentences are daunting in length and indicate the self-indulgence of the work as a whole. The author's insights into realism and surrealism, religiousness and secularism, and the creative process deserve greater exploration.
