Second Person Singular, by Sayed Kashua, Mitch Ginsburg - translator
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Second Person Singular, by Sayed Kashua, Mitch Ginsburg - translator
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From one of the most important contemporary voices to emerge from the Middle East comes a gripping tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, which asks whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves, to shed our old skin and start anew.
Second Person Singular follows two men, a successful Arab criminal attorney and a social worker-turned-artist, whose lives intersect under the most curious of circumstances. The lawyer has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of Jerusalem, a large house, a Mercedes, speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, and is in love with his wife and two young children. In an effort to uphold his image as a sophisticated Israeli Arab, he often makes weekly visits to a local bookstore to pick up popular novels. On one fateful evening, he decides to buy a used copy of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, a book his wife once recommended. To his surprise, inside he finds a small white note, a love letter, in Arabic, in her handwriting. "I waited for you, but you didn't come. I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?"
Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer slips into a blind rage over the presumed betrayal. He first considers murder, revenge, then divorce, but when the initial sting of humiliation and hurt dissipates, he decides to hunt for the book's previous owner - a man named Yonatan, a man who is not easy to track down, whose identity is more complex than imagined, and whose life is more closely aligned with his own than expected. In the process of dredging up old ghosts and secrets, the lawyer tears the string that holds all of their lives together.
A Palestinian who writes in Hebrew, Sayed Kashua defies classification and breaks through cultural barriers. He communicates, with enormous emotional power and a keen sense of the absurd, the particular alienation and the psychic costs of people struggling to straddle two worlds. Second Person Singular is a deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.
Second Person Singular, by Sayed Kashua, Mitch Ginsburg - translator - Amazon Sales Rank: #75512 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-05-06
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 574 minutes
Second Person Singular, by Sayed Kashua, Mitch Ginsburg - translator
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Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful. Seeing Israel Through Arab Eyes By Word Lover Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua is one of the most fascinating books I have read about contemporary Israel, and the first, I must confess, from an Arab-Israeli perspective. From an anthropological point of view the novel deserves 5-stars simply for illuminating non-Israeli readers on the highly Westernized habits and attitudes of the Arab protagonists as they become upwardly mobile, from the cars they drive to the coffee they drink. An American reader gets an `it's-a-small-world-after-all' vibe reading the book's revealing, abundant detail.But there is much more to this novel, which addresses the question of identity, rendered especially difficult for Arabs in Israel. For the most part, the story chronicles two Tel Aviv Arabs who re-invent themselves through education, hard work and materialism--harshly separating themselves from their roots. One character is a naïve, kind-hearted social worker-turned-photographer, who literally steals the identiy of Yonaton Forschmidt, the young, talented Ashkenazi Jewish-Israeli paraplegic for whom he cares. The other, who is never named, is a successful but self-loathing and equally insecure criminal lawyer. Their plotlines run on parallel courses and intersect only at the book's conclusion.Perhaps the most interesting character of all, however, is the Jewish-Israeli who suffers a mysterious accident and is left in a vegetative state to be cared for by the young Arab who adopts his identify. I was puzzled by the statement the author was trying to make. Does Yonaton represent the state of Israel and if so, why is he is voiceless and powerless? Are we to believe that he is as self-loathing as the Arabs? Is Sayed Kashua, a celebrated Israeli novelist and creator of a popular sit-com, saying his country is also trying to reconcile what its founders intended it to be with what it has become? I would have given the book 5-stars were this point made clear, and I be eager to explore this question in a book club. I recommend this book to any reader eager to get insights into what it means to live in Israel today, especially if you are an Arab.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful. Fascinating insight into Israeli Arabs By Alan A. Elsner This novel provides a fascinating insight into the lives of Israel's Arab minority wrapped in a skillful reworking of Tolstoy's novella "The Kreutzer Sonata."In that story, a man falls prey to violent, uncontrollable and irrational jealousy and imagines his wife is having an affair with a violinist on the basis of no actual evidence. He hides his raging jealousy and goes on a trip, but returns early, finds the two together and kills his wife with a dagger. He is later acquitted of murder by the courts.Sayed Kasua makes the connection to the novella very clear. A wealthy and successful Arab lawyer who practices in Jerusalem seems to have it all -- he is accepted by Israeli society, drives a fancy car and has a pretty wife and two young kids. But we're quickly aware that not all is well in the marriage. He and his wife do not sleep together and their sex seems perfunctory. And the lawyer, whose name we never learn, seems obsessed with various status symbols, perpetually measuring his place in a society in which he never quite feels completely at home.One day, he buys a second-hand copy of the Tolstoy book and a piece of paper falls out of it in his wife's handwriting. He immediately jumps to the conclusion she is having an affair.We then meet a young Arab social worker who is looking after a paraplegic Jewish man called Yonatan. We learn his story and how in a strange way it intersects with the lives of the lawyer and his wife.This is skillfully done but what elevates this book is the unusual background. We learn about the relations between Arabs and Jews but also the different strati of Arab society -- the differences between those from the city and from villages, those from the Galilee and the area known as the Triangle -- the way Israeli Arabs disdain Palestinians from the West Bank, the treatment of those suspected of being collaborators with the Israelis. We learn about the inferiority complex some suffer from in relations with Jews, about the meaning of identity. We learn a lot about the concept of honor and the fragility of women's rights in this society.This isn't the perfect novel. The lawyer's total irrationality is hard to understand and has been forced on the author by his adaptation of Tolstoy's template. But the book's virtues overwhelm this flaw.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Extraordinary Insight Into the "Palestian Problem" in Israel By Alan L. Chase Sayed Kashua has written a deeply moving and powerful novel. The center of the theme is Tolstoy's novella, "The Kreutzer Sonata." The music piece by the same name was composed by Beethoven. Tolstoy's piece examines the irrational jealousy of a husband who kills his wife in a fit of passion. Kashua has taken these dynamics and transplanted them to present day Jerusalem amid the background noise of the "Palestinian Question" in Israel.A successful Palestinian, a lawyer who is an Israeli citizen, buys a copy of Toltoy's novella, and in it finds a love note written in his wife's hand. Assuming that she is carrying on an elicit affair with Yonathan, whose name is in the used book, the lawyer becomes consumed with discovery the treason and punishing his wife. Yonathan is a poor Palestinian social worker from the humble Triangle region. He aspires to become a photographer, and changes his identity so that he can pass as Jewish. The identity he steals is that of a patient who hovers in a vegetative state after a failed suicide attempt.The story is told beautifully in counterpoint - going back and forth between the two Palestinian protagonists. It is at once a psychological thrill and a deep exploration of the sociological dynamics at work within present day Israel and even within the fractured Arab community. Kashua has a keen eye and ear for detail, so the dialogue captures fine nuances of conflict and attempts at communication.In the Epiloque, just when it appears that the lawyer's suspicions have been laid to rest, he stops by a photo exhibit, and the scab is pulled off the and doubts reappear. The reader is left hanging in suspense - much as Yonathan had hung suspended from his bedroom ceiling in his suicide attempt. It has the feel of a musical coda that ends with an unresolved dissonance. Very apt.Reading this book was a rich and enriching experience.
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Second Person Singular, by Sayed Kashua, Mitch Ginsburg - translator
