Novel
The Lover
המאהב
A. B. Yehoshua · 1977
Synopsis
Haifa, at the start of the Yom Kippur War. Gabriel Arditi, an Israeli who had lived in France for ten years, has come back to collect the inheritance of his grandmother Veducha, whom he found alive but unconscious. Adam, a well-off garage owner, took him in as an assistant to his wife Asya, a teacher and historian, whose lover he has become. On the first day of the war, Gabriel reports to the recruitment office and disappears. Adam searches for him at night with a tow truck, accompanied by Naïm, a young Arab from his garage, and by his daughter Dafi, fifteen, who no longer sleeps.
Context
It is Yehoshua's first novel, published by Schocken on 17 February 1977. It is made up of first-person monologues by six characters, who review the same events from different angles; the device returns in A Late Divorce. Naïm, the Arab boy, knows poems by Bialik by heart, which earns him the mockery of Jews and Arabs alike. The novel has been translated into twenty-three languages, adapted for the theatre in Haifa and at Habima, and twice for the cinema; in French, it appeared from Calmann-Lévy in the translation by Jacques Pinto.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred and sixty pages in French. It is worth knowing that the Egyptian and Syrian attack of October 1973 took the country by surprise.
Prizes and reception
Twenty-three translations and two films; the first novel by an author later awarded the Israel Prize.