Amin Oz

"Over everything lies a feeble, faded, sorrowful smile." This line by Ezra Zussman "in a poem about autumn evenings" encapsulates the meaning of this book: dense, gray, and seemingly mundane. Theo and Noa share an ordinary coexistence, made of small habits, silences, and fleeting moments of love. Both have led solitary, difficult lives. Having met by chance, they took refuge, in search of a fragile serenity, in a small town in the Israeli desert, where it seemed that > the pale boulders, the slope, the heights to the east, even the harsh glint of the stars, everything was waiting for a change. Imminent, in just a moment, when everything will be clear . Shattering their dreary everyday existence comes the overdose death of one of Noa's students, and the boy's father's wish to entrust her with establishing a drug rehabilitation center. Noa throws herself into the project with enthusiasm: she finally finds a purpose in life and, above all, asserts her independence from Theo, who is older and more experienced than she is. She is also driven by remorse for having failed to grasp the pleas for help the boy had somehow sent her. The town is suspicious and hostile toward the project. Theo would like to warn her, but he realizes that > the only way to help her is not to try to help her... Am I lying in wait, motionless, staring at her in the dark with petrified eyes, waiting for her to collapse from exhaustion? Then I will be able to bend down and take care of her as in the beginning. From the very beginning. There is a protective, almost paternal feeling in Theo, which nonetheless encloses Noa in a sort of chrysalis from which she cannot escape: she is too fragile, too strong is the need to feel protected and to run and nestle > into the dark cave of the chest hair (of Theo) as though he had been pregnant with me . And, > like water slowly flowing across the inside of eyelids shut from exhaustion , the project dissolves into nothingness. Noa herself grows weary of pursuing it, and everything slips back into prosaic daily life, into > a quiet, blissful dream, far from ourselves, far from pain and suffering, intent on listening to the gusts of the south wind that blows and stops and once again stirs the branches of the crippled pines in the garden of the ruin, and from there sweeps onward engulfing the entire town, reaching to feel from the outside the shutters we have closed.... in two and a half weeks the summer holidays will end . It is not the plot that stands at the heart of the narrative, which plays out entirely around the existential world of the characters. The author, however, has no psychological intent; rather, the emotions remain merely sketched, lightly rendered, and therefore mysterious. Even the literary device of dual narration (Theo and Noa are the narrators of the same events) does not lead to an interpretation of the story from two distinct points of view. Far from it: each chapter seems an end in itself, so much so that the reader scarcely realizes they are reading the same story seen from different angles. The true theme is existential, cosmic, and philosophical. The true protagonist is the desert, always identical to itself and always changing, swept by a fierce wind and characterized by an arid environment where vegetation barely manages to take root. The town itself consists of vast empty spaces, like "strips of desert," a botched concept of a garden city > flecked with scrap metal and a few shrubs that have crossed the boundary line between plant and mineral . The distinctive feature of the novel lies in its attention to the urbanistic dimension of human existence. We often forget that the streets, the architecture of buildings, the monuments, the green spaces, and the environment beyond the urban perimeter (where the forces of nature reclaim dominion) shape our existence, imparting to us the character of who we are. Thus, the sudden arrival of change (a drug rehabilitation center, turning into the periphery of a major city, and so on) not only dissolves a fragile urban fabric, but also overpowers and distorts our very essence. And it is not by locking ourselves within the "quiet normalcy" of the home that we can defend against social decay and existential atomization, which also stem from the collapse of meaning in the context in which we live. The core merit of the novel is its writing: both spare and poetic at once. Short sentences paired with expansive periods, punctuation that is at times redundant and at others non-existent, and a sparing, deliberate use of adjectives all contribute crucially to forging a dense narrative climate—exacting yet captivating—where gray and muted tones prevail: an atmosphere of sweet melancholy. Why read it? Though set in Israel, it is a novel that mirrors remarkably well the state of mind of Italians at this moment.