Victorious
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Memory Monster, a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, comes a gripping examination of the complexities of military service as experienced by Abigail, a psychologist who becomes implicated in the dilemmas soldiers encounter both on and off the battlefield.
The tenacious narrator of Yishai Sarid’s Victorious is Abigail, a military psychologist and single mother who has spent her career in the Israeli Army. A leading expert in the psychology of combat, Abigail helps soldiers negotiate the trauma of war while instructing commanders on best practices for killing with resilience and efficacy.
As her son Shauli approaches the age for military service, Abigail becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the army’s Chief of Staff and those of her patients, and the lines between her personal beliefs and her profession begin to blur. Meanwhile, Abigail’s deeply moral father, a clinical psychologist himself, openly condemns her choice to aid Israel's military machine. Yet for Abigail, it’s a patriotic duty. Only when gentle-hearted Shauli enlists in the elite and dangerous paratroopers unit are Abigail’s own mental defenses finally breached.
As he did in his acclaimed novel The Memory Monster, Yishai Sarid unmasks the contradictions at the heart of patriotism, national identity, and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. Victorious is a riveting, provocative inquiry into modern warfare that forces us to ask: what price are we willing to pay for victory?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A former Israeli army psychologist questions her ideals in Sarid's unsparing latest (after The Memory Monster). Abigail, now working in private practice with veterans, is called back to service by the army's chief of staff. "These are gentle kids, we never taught them how to kill," he tells her. She realizes to her horror that war is imminent just as her only child, Shauli, is enlisting with an elite combat unit. As she becomes more entwined with the military's mission, and even implicated in its violent means, her ailing father, a legendary psychoanalyst, admonishes her for how far she's strayed from the profession's morals: "You don't treat people.... You are a servant of power." For Abigail, the world is divided between the weak and the strong, and she's aligned herself with the victors. That is until the war begins and she gets a distressing phone call from Shauli's battalion about his mental condition. She finds him dazed and desperate to leave, and Sarid incisively lays bare the contradictions between her professional training, patriotic zeal, and recognition of the war's effect on her son. Sarid's frank portrayal of the emotional scars bore by successive generations of Israelis is sure to provoke strong feelings.
