A.B. Yehoshua

This weekend's weather nudged me towards another novel, as initially Balzac was proving elusive or resistant -- that has since been resolved and Lost Illusion is presently sparkling in my imagination. So the snow and the cold thinned the palette of possibilities and I wound up with the Faulkner of Israel as Mr. Yehoshua has been dubbed. The Woman in Jeruslaem thrives in anonymity, I was slow to greet this perspective and found the novel needlessly abstract until one fathoms the parallels between a frightened populace desperate for stability and only equipped with a technocratic grammar at its disposal. That said, the human elements have to transcend this for the narrative to be effective: they weren't and it didn't.