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lapantofola83's review against another edition
4.0
Fremevo dalla curiosità di leggere Le confessioni di Noa Weber senza sapere bene perché. Forse perché mi sono resa conto di non poter sempre leggere autori maschi. Forse perché non vedevo l’ora di leggere un ebook de La Giuntina. Forse perché speravo, non invano, di ritrovare un’eco della scrittura onesta e limpida di Shulim Vogelman, che ha tradotto il libro. Forse perché mi attirava la copertina, con queste splendide labbra leggermente imbronciate colorate di verde.
Ad ogni modo, non a torto fremevo dalla voglia di leggerlo. E adesso che ho digitalmente chiuso l’ultima pagina mi manca l’irruenza, la rabbia, l’emancipazione e la sincerità di Noa.
[...]
da La Pantofola Digitale
Ad ogni modo, non a torto fremevo dalla voglia di leggerlo. E adesso che ho digitalmente chiuso l’ultima pagina mi manca l’irruenza, la rabbia, l’emancipazione e la sincerità di Noa.
[...]
da La Pantofola Digitale
fishsauce's review against another edition
4.0
Perhaps the best thing I've read about obsessive love, if only because Noa Weber's love for Alek is not just felt, it is thought and understood, the obsession acknowledged and weaved deliberately into the fabric of her life rather than dismissed or reviled or 'worked on' in some way. For every moment where Noa looks pathetic for loving so undeserving a man as Alek with such blind intensity, there are a dozen that make her look triumphant and wise.
Hareven rambles a bit, and the book has a tendency to slide too far into the abstract for too long, but for all that a remarkable achievement.
Hareven rambles a bit, and the book has a tendency to slide too far into the abstract for too long, but for all that a remarkable achievement.
pantofola83's review against another edition
4.0
Fremevo dalla curiosità di leggere Le confessioni di Noa Weber senza sapere bene perché. Forse perché mi sono resa conto di non poter sempre leggere autori maschi. Forse perché non vedevo l’ora di leggere un ebook de La Giuntina. Forse perché speravo, non invano, di ritrovare un’eco della scrittura onesta e limpida di Shulim Vogelman, che ha tradotto il libro. Forse perché mi attirava la copertina, con queste splendide labbra leggermente imbronciate colorate di verde.
Ad ogni modo, non a torto fremevo dalla voglia di leggerlo. E adesso che ho digitalmente chiuso l’ultima pagina mi manca l’irruenza, la rabbia, l’emancipazione e la sincerità di Noa.
[...]
da La Pantofola Digitale
Ad ogni modo, non a torto fremevo dalla voglia di leggerlo. E adesso che ho digitalmente chiuso l’ultima pagina mi manca l’irruenza, la rabbia, l’emancipazione e la sincerità di Noa.
[...]
da La Pantofola Digitale
reallifereading's review
3.0
I have a love-hate affair with Overdrive. I love that I can borrow and return books without having to leave my bed. It’s got a pretty good selection – you should see my ‘wish list’ (where I’ve added books to read). But it also sucks – I can’t highlight passages, I can only bookmark pages. I know it’s a borrowed e-book but I would love to be able to highlight sections of the book to come back to later when I’m writing my review. But no…. just bookmarks, no highlighting, no note-taking.
So here I am stuck with many ‘bookmarks’ on the Overdrive e-book I’m blogging about, The Confessions of Noa Weber.
One of which was on page 10. And which I later realised was bookmarked for this passage:
“To confess to the finish… to confess till it finishes me off… to talk about him, to talk about myself, to talk so I won’t have to bear it any more. To talk until I can’t stand myself any longer. To talk, to talk, to talk myself to death – this is apparently why I’m standing here before you today.”
And that is essentially what The Confessions of Noa Weber is about. Noa Weber is 47 years old, a writer of crime novels (her protagonist is a very busty woman called Nira Woolf) in Israel. Her daughter is turning 29. And she has, for 30 years or so, been obsessively in love with Alek, whom she first met at a party as a teen and married to avoid being drafted.
It is an unrequited love:
“I loved him. And Alek wasn’t in love with me. And in spite of my youth, I did not give way to the temptation to interpret various gestures of his as possible manifestations of love. I did not count my steps to the refrain of ‘he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not…’. And even when I read between the lines – lovers will always read between the lines, they are never satisfied with the manifest content – I did not deceive myself by discovering signs of a feeling he did not possess. I loved him, and precisely for that reasons, I knew that he didn’t love me.”
This book could easily have sunken into some kind of weird deranged blog-style rant. Isn’t that what one immediately thinks of when it comes to obsessions? And this is some obsession. But Noa isn’t some pathetic lovelorn woman. Sure, as a young pregnant girl she was:
“What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered to pain for his sake.”
But the Noa Weber writing this ‘confession’ is more mature and self-aware, she is unfaltering in her need to confess. And she is also really dead on when it comes to her thoughts about love, young love, not-so-young love, unconditional love. It becomes quite philosophical, thoughtful.
However, I kept glancing at the bottom right corner of the Overdrive app, which tells me just how many pages are left. Because this isn’t the easiest book to read. It does get kind of annoying at times, so often I wanted to tell her, enough with Alek already. He’s not in love with you. He’s got other women, he’s even got other children by those women. But you know what? There’s no need. Because she knows all that already. She does. She is, after all, confessing all this to the reader. So I am guilty of skimming, a little on this page, a little on that. Because she gets a bit repetitive. So maybe I might have missed out on a few crucial emo bits, but sometimes skimming makes for a better book reading, because I can get on with it and move to another book.
So that’s my confession. I am a skimmer when the need arises. And in parts of this book, it did. But there is some part of me that understands Noa Weber and her unrequited love, I guess somewhere (perhaps buried deep inside) most of us, we would understand how she feels:
“There will never be a summer for us. Never in any summer will I walk with him along foreign streets, with their desperate squalor and their desperate splendor that I seem to know from some previous incarnation. And never will I experience again the consciousness of infinite expanses where everything seems pointless but love itself. Love will never expand me. The one right body will never come to me.”
So here I am stuck with many ‘bookmarks’ on the Overdrive e-book I’m blogging about, The Confessions of Noa Weber.
One of which was on page 10. And which I later realised was bookmarked for this passage:
“To confess to the finish… to confess till it finishes me off… to talk about him, to talk about myself, to talk so I won’t have to bear it any more. To talk until I can’t stand myself any longer. To talk, to talk, to talk myself to death – this is apparently why I’m standing here before you today.”
And that is essentially what The Confessions of Noa Weber is about. Noa Weber is 47 years old, a writer of crime novels (her protagonist is a very busty woman called Nira Woolf) in Israel. Her daughter is turning 29. And she has, for 30 years or so, been obsessively in love with Alek, whom she first met at a party as a teen and married to avoid being drafted.
It is an unrequited love:
“I loved him. And Alek wasn’t in love with me. And in spite of my youth, I did not give way to the temptation to interpret various gestures of his as possible manifestations of love. I did not count my steps to the refrain of ‘he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not…’. And even when I read between the lines – lovers will always read between the lines, they are never satisfied with the manifest content – I did not deceive myself by discovering signs of a feeling he did not possess. I loved him, and precisely for that reasons, I knew that he didn’t love me.”
This book could easily have sunken into some kind of weird deranged blog-style rant. Isn’t that what one immediately thinks of when it comes to obsessions? And this is some obsession. But Noa isn’t some pathetic lovelorn woman. Sure, as a young pregnant girl she was:
“What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered to pain for his sake.”
But the Noa Weber writing this ‘confession’ is more mature and self-aware, she is unfaltering in her need to confess. And she is also really dead on when it comes to her thoughts about love, young love, not-so-young love, unconditional love. It becomes quite philosophical, thoughtful.
However, I kept glancing at the bottom right corner of the Overdrive app, which tells me just how many pages are left. Because this isn’t the easiest book to read. It does get kind of annoying at times, so often I wanted to tell her, enough with Alek already. He’s not in love with you. He’s got other women, he’s even got other children by those women. But you know what? There’s no need. Because she knows all that already. She does. She is, after all, confessing all this to the reader. So I am guilty of skimming, a little on this page, a little on that. Because she gets a bit repetitive. So maybe I might have missed out on a few crucial emo bits, but sometimes skimming makes for a better book reading, because I can get on with it and move to another book.
So that’s my confession. I am a skimmer when the need arises. And in parts of this book, it did. But there is some part of me that understands Noa Weber and her unrequited love, I guess somewhere (perhaps buried deep inside) most of us, we would understand how she feels:
“There will never be a summer for us. Never in any summer will I walk with him along foreign streets, with their desperate squalor and their desperate splendor that I seem to know from some previous incarnation. And never will I experience again the consciousness of infinite expanses where everything seems pointless but love itself. Love will never expand me. The one right body will never come to me.”
arirang's review
3.0
Let's say Noa Weber is suddenly sixty-eight. A bony body full of the opinions of a militant old lady, climbing tip-tap up those same old stairs. An old body full of opinions entering its old house, and lying down on the same old bed to give its feet a rest. And when this Noa Weber finally lies down, what exactly runs through her brain's worn-out connections? Does she polish up one of her correct opinions? Reflect compassionately about one of the victims in her books? Does she think about reforming society and justice for all? Definitely not. Just like now, Noa Weber thinks about him.
The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from Gail Hareven’s Hebrew original by Dalia Bilu, was the winner of the 2010 Best Translated Book Award from a very strong shortlist including [b:The Discoverer|6192308|The Discoverer|Jan Kjærstad|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1293548002s/6192308.jpg|1734987], [b:Ghosts|3392293|Ghosts|César Aira|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348683259s/3392293.jpg|3432165], [b:The Tanners|6081631|The Tanners|Robert Walser|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348421619s/6081631.jpg|6154056], [b:The Twin|2857990|The Twin|Gerbrand Bakker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320436733s/2857990.jpg|2884125] and [b:The Weather Fifteen Years Ago|6298446|The Weather Fifteen Years Ago|Wolf Haas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328368608s/6298446.jpg|1482514].
The eponymous first person narrator is 47, a trained lawyer now active in a human rights NGO but also a commercially successful author, of escapist detective fiction. This book is ostensibly her non-fictional memoir.
Her story begins in October 1972, aged 17, when she met 28 year old Alex at a regular gathering of left wing political activists which took place at his flat, taken there by her 19 year old boyfriend Amikam. She immediately falls for Alek and moves into his flat.
Their relationship was, at least on Alek’s part, casual and uncommitted, but challenged by a fellow activist he agrees, rather spontaneously, to marry Noa purely to exempt her from military service. Her desire to avoid the military not stemming from fear, nor political ideology but partly from. a gradually burgeoning feminism, but most of all love.
The idea of serving in the army of occupation and oppression didn’t bother me particularly, what troubled me was the new awareness that the IDF was about to oppress me. ... It had no connection to ideology, or only a tenuous connection - my criticism of women’s service in the IDF developed years later - I only knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear it: I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Jerusalem, and I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Alek. Because I didn’t have an ounce of attention to invest in anything that wasn’t charged with my love.
To Alek the marriage is merely one on paper and in any case he, a recent immigrant to Israel and from an international background (his mother a Russian ethnic Jew but Christian convert), one very different to Noa’s own, plans to leave the country shortly to study in Germany:
This was something that was harder for me to understand - not only were we from different cultures, but he was the immigrant and I was the “WASP”. Not just a WASP, but a descendant of the “Mayflower” in Israeli terms, forty-eight on my father’s side, the pioneers of the early twenties on my mother’s.
But Noa falls pregnant and is disowned by her family. When she comes out of the hospital with her young baby daughter, Hagar, she finds Alek has actually accelerated his plans to leave for overseas (she finds some time later, to Paris not Heidelberg) although he has left her the long-term use of his flat where she proceeds to live for the following 30 years, years when, despite a number of short-term relationships, she remains passionately in love with Alek, who himself has children with another woman, seeing him on his occasional visits to Israel and visiting him a number of times in Moscow, but sometimes going years without contact.
This novel is her warts and all attempt to account for her lifelong obsession, her “dybbuk”, and move beyond Alek to a more transcendent understanding of love, and to escape the fate she sees for herself even in 20 years time (see the opening quote).
Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.
Her love focuses not on the physical Alek, who is absent, but on her memories:
What does it mean to love someone who isn’t there? If it weren’t for my highly developed memory, I would say that it is simply clinging to an idea, but the sensual memory that grew stronger as it dwelled on every scene was so vivid and detailed that on no account is it possible to speak of an idea, and in fact it often pierced me more sharply than reality itself.
But even though he is absent, in everything she does, I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.
And her daughter is, she admits, as much as she is a dutifully devoted mother, serves often solely as a medium for obtaining Alek’s love, such as when she sends her teenage daughter to visit her father in Paris.
The point is the despicable way I sometimes looked at her, through Alek’s imagined eyes ... I knew very well how loathsome these thoughts were, and nevertheless, before she set off for Paris, like a pimp I bought her a bottle of his favourite White Shoulders perfume, in the hope that in some unconscious way she might remind him of me.
Stylistically, from the outset Noa Weber eschews both local colour and also any neat presentation of her life:
It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere”, which in any case I have no desire to remember.
That said, Hereven very effectively weaves in the turbulent political developments of the 1972-2002 period in Israel into the background of the narration, and indeed, read during a visit to Tel Aviv, this was one of the book's strongest features for me.
Alek's first return from Paris is to help defend the country in the 1973 Yom Kippur conflict (in which Noa’s ex Amikam is killed on the Golan Heights), returning despite his political opposition to the treatment of the Palestinians, and he neatly skewer the anti-Zionism of his leftist Paris friends (with obvious resonance to the UK left today):
I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semitic and they just hate Israel.
Later in the book, and nearing his life’s end, Alek’s father emigrates from Russia to Israel, prompting this exchange amongst Noa’s parents;
My father said on the phone “... a person can go crazy with these characters who’ve decided to sign on as Zionist at this stage of the game.”
My mother intervened on the other phone and said “excuse me, that’s exactly what the State of Israel is for, so that anyone can remember whenever he likes.”
As mentioned, Noa is a successful author, the kickass heroine of her books (rather reminiscent of the later Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels) everything she isn’t. Sharing her human rights concerns, but taking very direct action to right wrongs, and loving and leaving her male conquests behind without a second thought:
My James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about. Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t.
But writing the novels allows Noa her one chance to escape:
My editor, who is more literary than I, once quoted me something Schiller is supposed to have said: All women writers write with one eye on the page and the other eye on a man, except for the Countess Von So-and-So who has one glass eye ...
With me it’s the complete opposite. I never wrote with one eye on Alek, I never attacked him, and with both eyes on the page I was actually free for a while of his imagined gaze.
The following passage sums up much of Noa’s approach to both this book and her contrasting detective thrillers:
The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of faux pas, because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick, the best thing about a good shtick is that like a hawker in the marketplace you can dish it out to people like a tasty morsel of yourself.
So I could sell you this wild shtick about how I got turned on by Alek, and how from the thing we had together I got pregnant, and how afterwards I got back into that whole scene again; and it’ll all be terribly flippant and witty, how I’ll laugh at her, and for a few moments perhaps I’ll even feel healed, because I’ll be really capable of laughing at “her,” who by then is already not completely me.
The truth is that emotional seriousness involves not a little stupidity. The stupidity lies in that toad-like inflation itself, as if vis-a-vis all the terribly painful and terribly important and terribly, terribly terrible things happening in the world, Noa Weber jumps up and croaks out loud: Listen, listen, look, look, I too have something terribly painful and terribly important to tell. Something about my tortured soul. Something about my delusions.
Nira Woolf, for example, would not make that mistake because my Nira is first of all a moral being, and it’s quite clear to her what is important and what is not. Fighting for the rights of disposed women, abused children, and so on, exposing the “system”, saving the innocent and stamping out evil - that’s important. But pining and whining about luuuve when your heart’s broken, all that’s just self-indulgence and nonsense as far as she’s concerned.
Noa's account is non-linear and, perhaps lacks any real sense of progress or greater understanding.
Overall though, certainly an interesting read - a powerful account of obsession and a fascinating indirect history of a secular Israeli during the 70d, 80s and 90s period, and while there may have been better books on a strong shortlist, still a worthy BTBA winner.
The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from Gail Hareven’s Hebrew original by Dalia Bilu, was the winner of the 2010 Best Translated Book Award from a very strong shortlist including [b:The Discoverer|6192308|The Discoverer|Jan Kjærstad|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1293548002s/6192308.jpg|1734987], [b:Ghosts|3392293|Ghosts|César Aira|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348683259s/3392293.jpg|3432165], [b:The Tanners|6081631|The Tanners|Robert Walser|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348421619s/6081631.jpg|6154056], [b:The Twin|2857990|The Twin|Gerbrand Bakker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320436733s/2857990.jpg|2884125] and [b:The Weather Fifteen Years Ago|6298446|The Weather Fifteen Years Ago|Wolf Haas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328368608s/6298446.jpg|1482514].
The eponymous first person narrator is 47, a trained lawyer now active in a human rights NGO but also a commercially successful author, of escapist detective fiction. This book is ostensibly her non-fictional memoir.
Her story begins in October 1972, aged 17, when she met 28 year old Alex at a regular gathering of left wing political activists which took place at his flat, taken there by her 19 year old boyfriend Amikam. She immediately falls for Alek and moves into his flat.
Their relationship was, at least on Alek’s part, casual and uncommitted, but challenged by a fellow activist he agrees, rather spontaneously, to marry Noa purely to exempt her from military service. Her desire to avoid the military not stemming from fear, nor political ideology but partly from. a gradually burgeoning feminism, but most of all love.
The idea of serving in the army of occupation and oppression didn’t bother me particularly, what troubled me was the new awareness that the IDF was about to oppress me. ... It had no connection to ideology, or only a tenuous connection - my criticism of women’s service in the IDF developed years later - I only knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear it: I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Jerusalem, and I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Alek. Because I didn’t have an ounce of attention to invest in anything that wasn’t charged with my love.
To Alek the marriage is merely one on paper and in any case he, a recent immigrant to Israel and from an international background (his mother a Russian ethnic Jew but Christian convert), one very different to Noa’s own, plans to leave the country shortly to study in Germany:
This was something that was harder for me to understand - not only were we from different cultures, but he was the immigrant and I was the “WASP”. Not just a WASP, but a descendant of the “Mayflower” in Israeli terms, forty-eight on my father’s side, the pioneers of the early twenties on my mother’s.
But Noa falls pregnant and is disowned by her family. When she comes out of the hospital with her young baby daughter, Hagar, she finds Alek has actually accelerated his plans to leave for overseas (she finds some time later, to Paris not Heidelberg) although he has left her the long-term use of his flat where she proceeds to live for the following 30 years, years when, despite a number of short-term relationships, she remains passionately in love with Alek, who himself has children with another woman, seeing him on his occasional visits to Israel and visiting him a number of times in Moscow, but sometimes going years without contact.
This novel is her warts and all attempt to account for her lifelong obsession, her “dybbuk”, and move beyond Alek to a more transcendent understanding of love, and to escape the fate she sees for herself even in 20 years time (see the opening quote).
Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.
Her love focuses not on the physical Alek, who is absent, but on her memories:
What does it mean to love someone who isn’t there? If it weren’t for my highly developed memory, I would say that it is simply clinging to an idea, but the sensual memory that grew stronger as it dwelled on every scene was so vivid and detailed that on no account is it possible to speak of an idea, and in fact it often pierced me more sharply than reality itself.
But even though he is absent, in everything she does, I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.
And her daughter is, she admits, as much as she is a dutifully devoted mother, serves often solely as a medium for obtaining Alek’s love, such as when she sends her teenage daughter to visit her father in Paris.
The point is the despicable way I sometimes looked at her, through Alek’s imagined eyes ... I knew very well how loathsome these thoughts were, and nevertheless, before she set off for Paris, like a pimp I bought her a bottle of his favourite White Shoulders perfume, in the hope that in some unconscious way she might remind him of me.
Stylistically, from the outset Noa Weber eschews both local colour and also any neat presentation of her life:
It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere”, which in any case I have no desire to remember.
That said, Hereven very effectively weaves in the turbulent political developments of the 1972-2002 period in Israel into the background of the narration, and indeed, read during a visit to Tel Aviv, this was one of the book's strongest features for me.
Alek's first return from Paris is to help defend the country in the 1973 Yom Kippur conflict (in which Noa’s ex Amikam is killed on the Golan Heights), returning despite his political opposition to the treatment of the Palestinians, and he neatly skewer the anti-Zionism of his leftist Paris friends (with obvious resonance to the UK left today):
I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semitic and they just hate Israel.
Later in the book, and nearing his life’s end, Alek’s father emigrates from Russia to Israel, prompting this exchange amongst Noa’s parents;
My father said on the phone “... a person can go crazy with these characters who’ve decided to sign on as Zionist at this stage of the game.”
My mother intervened on the other phone and said “excuse me, that’s exactly what the State of Israel is for, so that anyone can remember whenever he likes.”
As mentioned, Noa is a successful author, the kickass heroine of her books (rather reminiscent of the later Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels) everything she isn’t. Sharing her human rights concerns, but taking very direct action to right wrongs, and loving and leaving her male conquests behind without a second thought:
My James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about. Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t.
But writing the novels allows Noa her one chance to escape:
My editor, who is more literary than I, once quoted me something Schiller is supposed to have said: All women writers write with one eye on the page and the other eye on a man, except for the Countess Von So-and-So who has one glass eye ...
With me it’s the complete opposite. I never wrote with one eye on Alek, I never attacked him, and with both eyes on the page I was actually free for a while of his imagined gaze.
The following passage sums up much of Noa’s approach to both this book and her contrasting detective thrillers:
The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of faux pas, because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick, the best thing about a good shtick is that like a hawker in the marketplace you can dish it out to people like a tasty morsel of yourself.
So I could sell you this wild shtick about how I got turned on by Alek, and how from the thing we had together I got pregnant, and how afterwards I got back into that whole scene again; and it’ll all be terribly flippant and witty, how I’ll laugh at her, and for a few moments perhaps I’ll even feel healed, because I’ll be really capable of laughing at “her,” who by then is already not completely me.
The truth is that emotional seriousness involves not a little stupidity. The stupidity lies in that toad-like inflation itself, as if vis-a-vis all the terribly painful and terribly important and terribly, terribly terrible things happening in the world, Noa Weber jumps up and croaks out loud: Listen, listen, look, look, I too have something terribly painful and terribly important to tell. Something about my tortured soul. Something about my delusions.
Nira Woolf, for example, would not make that mistake because my Nira is first of all a moral being, and it’s quite clear to her what is important and what is not. Fighting for the rights of disposed women, abused children, and so on, exposing the “system”, saving the innocent and stamping out evil - that’s important. But pining and whining about luuuve when your heart’s broken, all that’s just self-indulgence and nonsense as far as she’s concerned.
Noa's account is non-linear and, perhaps lacks any real sense of progress or greater understanding.
Overall though, certainly an interesting read - a powerful account of obsession and a fascinating indirect history of a secular Israeli during the 70d, 80s and 90s period, and while there may have been better books on a strong shortlist, still a worthy BTBA winner.
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