This book collects four lectures delivered by Grossman between 2004 and 2006.
Two of them concern the nature of writing, while the others address the "appalling, ambiguous, and complex" situation of Israel.
What unites the reflection on literature with that on politics is the writer's mission: for Grossman, it consists of refusing the

surrender of the possibility of understanding what I truly think...
So that, perhaps, it would be better not to think, not to know, to entrust the task of thinking, acting, and establishing moral norms to those who certainly know better than I do

.
Grossman shares the view expressed by Vargas Llosa in the preface to Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: literature originates from the writer's dissent from the world, from

what he would like to suppress, add, or correct in life

.
The starting point is, however, an inward search that recalls Pamuk, for whom

being a writer means being aware of the secret wounds we carry within us

(My Father's Suitcase).
Indeed, for the Israeli author,

the primary impulse that triggers and drives writing is the desire to invent and tell a story, and to know oneself.
Moreover, the more I write, the more I realize the power of a second impulse, which cooperates with and completes the first: the desire to know one's fellow man from the inside, from within...
to feel what it means to be another person

.
And thus the fundamental motive

is the yearning to voluntarily remove what defends me from the other

, in order to overcome

the effort we make not to expose ourselves completely to the other...
to preserve... the framework in which our multiform and erratic psyche is contained, and at times imprisoned

.
The pivot of this transition from the self to others is constituted by characters.

Writing a novel means, to a large extent, being fully responsible for a few dozen characters

.
To explain this statement, especially pertinent in light of the descriptive and psychological poverty of so many modern novels, Grossman relies on an apt metaphor.
The writer is like someone who keeps dozens of people imprisoned in a cellar.

Every now and then he would do well to have a chat with them... try to defuse tensions...
listen to their stories and memories, remind them of everything that is still left to dream of, to mourn, so that for a moment they forget the suffocating pit in which they find themselves

.
From this focus on characters arise the tasks that Grossman assigns to politics.

If there is one thing I would hope politicians and leaders might sooner or later learn from literature, it is precisely this way of dedicating oneself to a situation, and to the people trapped within it

, to no small degree because of the traps those very politicians and leaders helped create.
The mention of political responsibility leads directly to the lectures addressing Israel's dramatic situation.
One cannot help but admire Grossman’s courage, but also his dignity, in directly calling out the Israeli government's culpability in pursuing an aggressive policy that is distorting the very foundations of the State of Israel, its institutions, and the rule of law itself, setting in motion an apparently irreversible process of "disorientation and dismemberment...
of the public, social body."
Yet Grossman’s most compelling reflection concerns an aspect seldom emphasized: the gradual disappearance of the

model of the universal, cosmopolitan Jew, who aspires to fulfill an intellectual and moral mission

, supplanted by utilitarianism, brute force, and aggressive competitiveness.
If the land of Israel was meant, in the ideals of Zionism, to end the Diaspora and render the Jewish people finally "equal" to other nations, fear and hostility toward others (first and foremost toward the Palestinians) perpetuate the psychological and spiritual patterns of the Diaspora—this time in an aggressive key.
From oppressed, the Jewish people become the oppressor.

It is futile to look in Grossman's lectures for the lightness and subtle irony of Pamuk or Vargas Llosa.
This is not merely the author's style, which is invariably solemn, intricate, and meditative.
It is the tragedy of the man—as an individual (above all, as a father mourning the loss of his son), as an Israeli witnessing the unraveling of his own people, and as a Jew confronting the betrayal of millennial values—that prevents Grossman from casting aside dark and tragic undertones.
The anguish oozing from every word, the philosophical edge of his considerations, and the sense of an inescapable fate that can be counterbalanced only by utopia make for a heavy and demanding, at times repetitive, read.
Only at certain moments does one emotionally empathize with the writer.
It occurs when, in his magnificent commemoration of Rabin, he asks with dignity not to be judged with pity and indulgence as though driven by a "feeling of anger and vengeance" over the terrible tragedy of his son's death.
Even grief can be wielded by power to silence dissent and critique!

Why read it? The reflections on the writer and on literature are particularly compelling.

Through the eyes of the enemy