Bliss: A Novel

by Ronit Matalon, Jessica Cohen (Translator)

Overview

Set in Tel Aviv and Paris, a powerful story of love, friendship, regret, and war, as current as today's headlines

Ronit Matalon's fiction has been praised as "haunting," "inventive," "refreshingly daring." Now in a graceful, illuminating second novel, she tells a provocative story of two loves, two partings, two worlds, two women: Ofra and Sarah.

When Ofra is called from Tel Aviv to France to attend the funeral of her beloved cousin Michel, she escapes a life lived vicariously through Sarah, her oldest friend, a photographer and political activist. In Paris, Ofra enters the embrace of her French family and the intimate world of domestic life, while Sarah, in Tel Aviv, drifts even farther from her husband, Udi. Drawn to a Palestinian nationalist, she takes on the fight for a girl from Gaza who has been injured by an Israeli bullet and needs medical treatment that can only be had inside Israel. As Sarah adopts the cause with near- destructive zeal and pledges herself to the suffering of others, her own child goes untended, with dreadful consequences for all.

Against a backdrop of national conflict, Bliss confronts the terrible dilemma of choosing between one's desires and one's beliefs, between grand ideological commitment and the more mundane claims of family. With vivid, penetrating prose, Matalon has delivered a large and resonant work that is as artful as it is affecting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466845756
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/21/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	302 KB

About the Author

Ronit Matalon is the author of the novel The One Facing Us. A bestselling writer in Israel whose work has been translated throughout the world, Matalon is also an influential journalist, columnist, and reviewer. She lives in Tel Aviv.

Ronit Matalon, the author of The One Facing Us and Bliss, among other books, is one of Israel’s foremost writers. Her work has been translated into six languages and honored with the prestigious Bernstein Award; the French publication of The Sound of Our Steps won the Prix Alberto-Benveniste for 2013. A journalist and critic, Matalon also teaches comparative literature and creative writing at Haifa University and at the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. She lives in Tel Aviv.

Editorial Reviews

Bliss was written before the recent cycle of suicide bombings and reprisals made such innocent deaths a commonplace, providing pain more unendurable than that of a tormented conscience. (The title is almost an affront, perhaps appreciated only by readers in a society whose exceptional logic of spirit is daily maddened by the crushing illogic of event.) One of Ronit Matalon's many achievements is to twist a steely link between Israel's two pains: those it inflicts and those it suffers. — Richard Eder

The New York Times

An Israeli photographer who champions Palestinian rights pursues a dangerous affair that proves disastrous for her and her son in Matalon's latest (after The One Facing Us), an edgy, elliptical novel set in France and Tel Aviv and steeped in Mideastern politics. Sarah, 35, is the photographer protagonist; her story is told from the perspective of her best friend, Ofra, who is summoned from Tel Aviv to a provincial township near Paris for the funeral of her cousin Michel after he dies of AIDS. As Ofra settles into her extended family's domestic rituals in France, she learns about the disintegration of Sarah's marriage to her passive husband, Udi, an army medic, after Sarah becomes involved with a Palestinian named Marwan. With Ofra as narrator, Matalon achieves a measured, objective tone, but she is unable to fully account for Sarah's passion for Marwan, which seems especially puzzling as Sarah is embroiled in an incident in the Gaza strip and Marwan becomes violent and erratic. Matalon's finely calibrated prose, cosmopolitan outlook and nuanced perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict give the novel a sophisticated grace, but Ofra never takes on sufficient depth and authority as narrator, while Sarah's passion seems more like an act of wild irresponsibility rather than the erotic obsession Matalon hints at throughout the narrative. Matalon's keen sense of place and awareness of the emotional undercurrents of political activism give this novel a heady appeal, but the diffuseness of focus prevents it from entirely cohering. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Sarah and Ofra, friends since their preteen years, star in this Israeli novel, which features strong personalities, political activism, and ethnic diversity. In her first novel, The One Facing Us, Matalon used actual photographs to illustrate the Egyptian Jewish family she described. In this second novel, she makes reference to photos (her heroine is a photographer) and uses description as though she were describing photographic works. Sarah, a neurotic "people user," systematically decimates her friendship with Ofra, her marriage to Udi, and her affair with Marwin, a Palestinian. Attacking everything with extraordinary zeal, Sarah demands total fealty from those around her, whether to accompany her on a photo shoot or to help with meetings of a group involved with a family in Gaza whose daughter was killed by an Israeli bullet. As Sarah loses sight of family obligations, her child goes unattended, and Ofra and Udi try to pull her back from the abyss. The domestic scenes of Ofra's family in France, where a cousin has died of AIDS, relieve the strain. An interesting if difficult read that attests viscerally to friendship, loyalty, and their consequences.-Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A circuitous second novel by Israeli author Matalon (The One Facing Us, 1998), told in flashbacks, follows a soured friendship between two Tel Aviv women during the years of intifada. Past and present events dart in and out of this many-faceted, frequently ambiguous narrative: By the time narrator Ofra and her best friend from childhood, Sarah, bid goodbye at the Tel Aviv airport (Ofra is boarding her flight to France, where she'll attend the funeral of her AIDS-stricken cousin), the two 35-year-old friends have already grown estranged over the derailment of Sarah's marriage after her reckless affair with a young Arab man. Sarah is a political bleeding-heart photographer who champions the Palestinian cause, while Ofra, a plain, selfless graduate student, maintains the academic distance of a wary observer as Sarah throws herself into dramas both domestic and national. Her impulsive marriage to army medic Udi produces her son, Mims, and a seemingly blissful arrangement whereby Ofra contributes equally to the care of the boy; yet Sarah's ambivalence about motherhood and marriage prompts her to fall for an arrogant Palestinian, Marwan, whose family and social constraints eventually lead him to dump her brutally. Meanwhile, in France, a separate storyline begins, this involving Ofra's extended French family as they cope with bruised feelings pertaining to the funeral of gay cousin Michel, whose grievance with the French airline he (and his father) worked for remains unclear. It may be that much here suffers in translation-a kind of coy obliqueness, for example, about Arab-Jewish relations (and also Jewish-Gentile dealings in French society) that may not be immediately graspable by the Americanreader. "Bugs trapped inside a jar, that's what we are here," Udi comments, seemingly referring to the Israeli penchant for euphemism and self-deception. Too, the climax involving Sarah's beating is buried under disorienting layers of narrative back-and-forth, and her erratic behavior in switching between Udi and Marwan appears merely self-serving and unworthy of Ofra's earnest friendship. Imperfect and mis-titled yet incisive, Bliss provides a colloquial glimpse at the Israeli social fabric.

Kirkus Reviews