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Publisher's Weekly Review
Publishers Weekly® Reviews
- Reviewed in: Publishers Weekly, page 165.
- Review Date: 2007-08-06
- Reviewer: Staff
Israeli novelist Govrin (The Name) juxtaposes one women's difficult search for personal and professional fulfillment against modern Israel's quagmire of political and social issues. Ilana Tsuriel's accidental death at the book's opening quashes her vision for a revolutionary architecture project in Jerusalem. The project borrows concepts about land and property ownership from biblical texts and is intended to promote peace in a city perpetually in turmoil. Left behind are her journal notes, photographs and sketches. As the title suggests, Ilana's work and private life unfold, often in dialogue with her deceased Zionist father, in a patchwork of musings justifying her personal and professional choices; assessing her father's role in Israel's independence; considering her scholar husband's Holocaust obsessions; finding terms for the perpetual clash between Israelis and Palestinians. She also has multiple affairs, not the least significant of which is with a Palestinian involved with her Jerusalem project. While many observations are vivid and immediate, the vast amount of territory Govrin tries to cover dissipates the narrative and Ilana herself, whose motivations never completely crystallize. (Oct.)
BookPage Review
Life through the pieces left behind
Some novels are written for adults. Not necessarily because they are sexually explicit or excessively violent, but because they are for readers who aren't looking for easy answers or paint-by-numbers plots. Snapshots by Israeli author Michal Govrin is such a novel, difficult but thought-provoking in the best way.
Snapshots opens with the news that Ilana Tsuriel, a renowned Israeli architect, has died in a car crash. Her husband is sorting through the papers and journals she's left behind, and these documents form the majority of the novel—unsent letters to her father, a pioneer Zionist; sketches of her work in progress; snapshots from her travels; and most surprising, the very intimate account of an affair with a Palestinian theater director, Sayyid. The mix of text, photographs and hand-drawn illustrations create a visual experience rare in fiction, and the shifts in time and place—from New Jersey to Paris to Jerusalem—increase the sense of mobility and fragmentation of Ilana's professional and personal life.
The controversial nature of Ilana's project, creating a series of impermanent structures in Jerusalem highlighting the connection of Israelis and Palestinians to the physical land of Israel, is also at the heart of her conflicted emotional relationships. Through letters home we learn she was estranged from her father, as much as she was drawn to his sincerity and shaped by his ideas. Her ambivalent relationship with her emotionally distant husband, Alain, a French Holocaust scholar, is hampered by her infidelities and his immersion in his work. Even her colleagues question Ilana's recklessness and are suspicious of her ties with Sayyid. The penultimate section of the book, a day-to-day account of Ilana's life outside Jerusalem with her children during the Gulf War, is a showdown between her artistic idealism and the political realities of living life in a bomb shelter.
Ultimately, Snapshots asks more questions than it answers, and though it dazzles with poetic metaphors, one occasionally longs for a more straightforward story. But Govrin's novel is a brave experiment that encourages us to ponder the many facets of ourselves.