Marking time in dreams

Press, 10 August 1985, Page 20

Marking time in dreams

My Michael. By Amos Oz. Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. Fontana, 1984. 224 pp. $10.95 (paperback). Hannah Goren, aged 30 in 1960, lives very quietly in Jerusalem, married to Michael, a lecturer in geology. In her head are childhood dreams of passionate Arabs, of whirling tempestuous dancers, of flooding sensuality and luxurious living. Her day-to-day life is with a carefully responsible and caring husband, whose nick-name as a student was “Goofy”, a cheap, mass-built apartment, and a child-prodigy son for whom she can feel no depth of love. Without any embellishments, rather like the straight, clean facades of traditional Jerusalem building styles, the author conveys Hannah’s continuing inner world while she goes through a type of somnambulistic ritual of wife and motherhood. Her previously boyish husband is fading into characteristics not only of his deceased father, but even of his grandfather. An almost inevitable mental collapse is shown in the same unhurried style, with cold baths on freezing Jerusalem winter days and a short period of complete withdrawal. The background of the first, brief Israeli war — in which Michael, unable to make contact personally, soldiers as a signaller corporal — fixes the setting of biblical Jerusalem.

However, this sensitively-felt and worked through account of two people who meet and marry and multiply over ten years, without ever meeting emotionally, could be set in any suburb of the Western world with two middleclass characters marking time vaguely, unhappily towards their deaths. — Ralf Unger.