Just as Louis de Bernières’s fiction owes a debt to South American literature, so too Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s lush first novel, translated by Sondra Silverston, seems to take inspiration from the magical-realist traditions of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. But she is Israeli, and the culture and history of Israel clearly inform her writing. Set in the years before the birth of Israel, during the British Mandate for Palestine and Nazi rule in Europe, the novel wears its period lightly. Eternal themes of love and longing, sex and marriage take priority. This is story-telling that feels instinctive, chasing characters into extreme situations. Reversals of fortune and the literary equivalent of handbrake turns follow one another furiously. Characters suffer and prosper in love, living, dying, hoping, despairing. Men and women smash together, scorching each other, sometimes fatally, with the intensity of their desires. Gundar-Goshen exerts reassuring control over her narrative, though, and confidently moulds symmetries from it that are both moving and satisfying.
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