A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS, A NOVEL BY AMOS OZ (BOOK REVIEW AND RECOMMENDATION)

August 31, 2023

Hi there! Today I'll share a review for a book I'm quite emotionally attached to. A Tale of Love and Darkness is a wonderful memoir ( I would call it an autobiographical novel) by Israeli writer Amos Oz. Published in 2002, this memoir has been translated in about 30 languages. Moreover, it has sold million of copies.

A Tale of Love and Darkness chronicles much of Oz's childhood in the early days of state of Israel but it also explores the history of his family. Oz writes a lot about his relationship with his parents, especially with his mother. There's also a movie adaptation (worth noting for those who are not inclined to love reading).

Now, I've read many books by Amos Oz (review for his novel Fima here), but among all of his books, this one seems the most significant to me. Moreover, A Tale of Love and Darkness remains my favourite one. What I particularly remember is the complexity of it. Plus, it's simply a perfect book for bookworms. Why it is so? Because it speaks to the book lover. Scroll down to read more of my review!

“When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somewhere....”

“If you have no more tears left to weep, then don’t weep. Laugh.”

“The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words.”

“There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you're given, with no opportunity to choose.”

“But there's also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others.”

“....And in fact that selfsame strange urge I had when I was small - the desire to grant a second chance to something that could never have one - is still one of the urges that set me going today whenever I sit down to write a story.”

WHEN YOU GET EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED TO A BOOK

I remember how unthinkable it was for me to think that somebody could not like this book. So, I guess I was quite emotional about it. I remembered writing something along these lines in my original review: ' If you read this book and didn't like it, how can be friends?'

“I wasn't jealous and I wasn't resentful. Maybe it's the people who are the least loved, provided they're not envious or bitter, who find the most love in themselves to give to others. Don't you think?

I would say that generally I'm open minded and tolerant when it comes to literature, mainly because I don't believe there is such a thing as one 'correct' reading. Nevertheless, in this case I just have to be hopelessly sentimental and treat this novel as it was an actual person and not just a work of art that can be examined and viewed from different perspectives. It is perfectly normal we all have different tastes and hence experience literary works in our own way. After all, I myself had varied experiences reading same books. Nevertheless, the very idea that somebody might not like this novel, makes me very upset, which probably indicated a rather strong emotional attachment to it.

A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS EXAMINES DEEPLY SENSITIVE SUBJECTS

Maybe it is the fact that this novel deals with some really sensitive subjects is what makes me feel quite protective about it. It may have something to do with the intimate nature of this novel. Oz writes about his closest relationships, mostly about his immediate family members. He writes about his mother’s suicide and her struggle with depression.

This novel feels like a portal into his soul, providing you with a complete view of his most hidden secrets and desires. While reading A Tale of Love and Darkness, you have a sensation of taking a spiritual voyage with him, following him every step of the way. Moreover, you have this feeling of sharing something very private with someone. I had this uncanny feeling of having known Oz’s mother when I read it. Not knowing her as a character, but as a real person of flash and blood. Knowing her in a way I had only known a handful people in my entire life. For when we can truly say that we know somebody?

WHY JEWS VALUE EDUCATION?

“......with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment in the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, heaven forbid, there’s another war, another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live.”

.....

IS LIFE TRULY BETTER FOR WOMEN NOW?

“There was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home—but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time: from when you leave your parents' home to your first pregnancy. From that moment, from the first pregnancy, we had to begin to live our lives only around the children. Just like our mothers. Even to sweep pavements for our children, because your child is the chick and you are—what? When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats so as to grow big and strong. And when your child grows up—even then you can't go back to being yourself, you simply change from being a mother to being a grandmother, whose task is simply to help her children bring up their children.

True, even then there were quite a few women who made careers for themselves and went out into the world. But everybody talked about them behind their backs: look at that selfish woman, she sits in meetings while her poor children grow up in the street and pay the price.

Now it's a new world. Now at last women are given more opportunity to live lives of their own. Or is it just an illusion? Maybe in the younger generations too women still cry into their pillows at night, while their husbands are asleep, because they feel they have to make impossible choices? I don't want to be judgmental: it's not my world anymore. To make a comparison I'd have to go from door to door checking how many mothers' tears are wept every night into the pillow when husbands are asleep, and to compare the tears then with the tears now.”

MEMORABLE QUOTES ABOUT BOOKS

“I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you goose-flesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells. ”

“If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.”

“....while it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you. Naturally you sometimes dropped them, maybe for several years, or even forever. But they, even if you betrayed them, would never turn their backs on you: they would go on waiting for you silently and humbly on their shelf. They would wait for ten years. They wouldn't complain. One night, when you suddenly needed a book, even at three in the morning, even if it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you, it would come down from its shelf and keep you company in your moment of need. It would not try to get its own back or make excuses or ask itself if it was worth its while or if you deserved it or if you still suited each other, it would come at once as soon as you asked. A book would never let you down.”

“.....books standing up and other books lying down on top of them; plump, resplendent foreign books stretching themselves comfortably, and other wretched books that peered at you from cramped and crowded conditions, lying like illegal immigrants crowded on bunks aboard ship. Heavy, respectable books in gold-tooled leather bindings, and thin books bound in flimsy paper, splendid portly gentlemen and ragged, shabby beggars, and all around and among and behind them was a sweaty mass of booklets, leaflets, pamphlets, offprints, periodicals, journals, and magazines, that noisy crowd that always congregates around any public square or marketplace.”

"...books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.”

“I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don't always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself.”

A LITERARY MEMOIR THAT CAN BE COMPARED WITH GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURE

A Tale of Love and Darkness made me think of many great novels, but most of all, it made me think of Kafka and in a particular of one book of his that comes closest to being an autobiography. When I started reading Letters to Milena, I had this guilty feeling of intruding somebody’s life yet it was not possible to put it down or avoiding getting completely engrossed in it. The letters exchanged (that goes for Milena’s letters as well, not just those Kafka wrote) there are one of those rare instances when literature and life walk hand in hand.

THE MAGICAL TIES OF LITERATURE AND LIFE

It is something that rarely happens and it can not be forced, that magic of literature and life existing at the same time. In this case, they are real love letters, but they are also real literature. That is what this novel is to me. There are many ways to read it, but after reading it, I had the feeling of knowing the author and that is something I cannot shake off. Sure, one might argue that every novel speaks as much about the author as an autobiography could, but reading autobiographical material is bound to feel more personal.

WHAT NOVEL CAN BE COMPARED WITH THIS ONE?

I have certainly never read autobiographical writing that I could compare with this one. I said earlier that this memoir made me think of a great many books, but it is difficult to truly compare it with another book. I find it very hard to think of a book of this magnitude, for A Tale of Love and Darkness is truly an unique masterpiece. I can find comparisons with other novels, but it would be hard to find a novel that compares to it. I’m thinking War and Peace because that is generally one that I refuse to compare with others.

War and Peace managed to perfectly recreate an era, paint Europe with precision, all while masterfully portraying an amazing amount of absolutely credible characters, have a great story and managing to ask all the questions that actually matter, thus becoming a meditation on spirituality and meaning of life. Yes, I can imagine this novel on the same shelf with War and Peace.

Monumental works of literature for sure. Having read this book, I can't help feeling that I know Oz. I don't really know him in person (despite what I might feel), but I have utmost respect for him as a writer.

MEMORABLE QUOTES:

WHAT SHOULD A WOMEN LOOK FOR IN A MAN AND WHAT SHOULD A MAN LOOK FOR IN A WOMEN?

A WOMAN SHOULD LOOK FOR DECENCY

“Feelings are just a fire in a field of stubble: it burns for a moment, and then all that’s left is soot and ashes. Do you know what the main thing is—the thing a woman should look for in her man? She should look for a quality that’s not at all exciting but that’s rarer than gold: decency.”

A MAN SHOULD LOOK FOR A FRIEND......

BECAUSE A FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMEN IS MORE PRECIOUS AND RARE THAN LOVE......

“There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tyrant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.”

WEALTH IS A SIN AND POVERTY IS A PUNISHMENT

“Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.”

HE UNDERSTANDS WHERE HE HAD COME FROM

“I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Maimonides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night.”

THE SECRET OF GRANDFATHER'S CHARM

“What was the secret of Grandpa's charm? I began to understand only years later. He possessed a quality that is hardly ever found among men, a marvelous quality that for many women is the sexiest in a man:

He listened.

He did not just politely pretend to listen, while impatiently waiting for her to finish what she was saying and shut up.

He did not break into his partner's sentence and finish it for her.

He did not cut in to sum up what she was saying so as to move on to another subject.

He did not let his interlocutress talk into thin air while he prepared in his head the reply he would make when she finally finished.

He did not pretend to be interested or entertained, he really was. Nu, what: he had an inexhaustible curiosity.

He was not impatient. He did not attempt to deflect the conversation from her petty concerns to his own important ones.

On the contrary: he loved her concerns. He always enjoyed waiting for her, and if she needed to take her time he took pleasure in all her contortions.

He was in no hurry, and he never rushed her. He would wait for her to finish, and even when she had finished, he did not pounce or grab but enjoyed waiting in case there was something more, in case she was carried along on another wave.

He loved to let her take him by the hand and lead him to her own places, at her own pace. He loved to be her accompanist.

He loved getting to know her. He loved to understand, to get to the bottom of her. And beyond.”

WHAT DRIVES POETS AND WRITERS TO SEEK ONE ANOTHER?

“… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.”

THE BIRTH OF AN ISRAEL, THE RISE OF A NATION

Amos certainly managed to recreate past, painting not only history of one country but of others as well, of all its complexity that comes out of its being inevitably linked to so many other countries, cultures and languages. He tells the story of a birth of a nation and he certainly manages to take us back in time.

“When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, "Jews go home to Palestine." Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, "Jews get out of Palestine.”

THE STORY OF LOVE, LIFE AND DEATH

Yet, most of all, Amos Oz tells a story of life and death. Life and death in all its complexity. Life and death of an individual. Life and death of a family. Few have spoken about their life thus intimately and managed to create a masterpiece in the process. I would have never had the guts to write anything like this. It is as if he has barred his very soul on the paper. It is an autobiography but it is also literature at its finest. It is incredibly touching and endlessly sad. It is powerful and it is raw. It is subtle and it is gentle. It ingenious. An unique work of art. A true masterpiece.

SOMETIMES YOU SIMPLY FALL IN LOVE WITH A BOOK

Generally, I enjoy reading reviews and opinions that differ from my own, but not in this case. If you're interested in reading it and have some questions about it, feel free to ask but I'm not sure how eloquent I will be. Some books just crawl in some part of your soul and remain there. You almost want them hidden, you want to keep them a secret…and you almost don't want to share your experience with anyone. You want to, but you’re not sure you’ve what it takes.

Some books are pure magic. They change your life. This is one of those books. I read it and I loved it, yet I find talking about it difficult. It is like when you really like somebody and you choke when you are with them. Perhaps is safe enough to say that I have fallen in love with it.