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the complete review - memoir

A Tale of Love and Darkness

by
Amos Oz

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A : effective if roundabout memoir

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  All very impressed

  From the Reviews:

• "Wer sich dem Bann des Landes und seiner Einwohner gerade nicht reisend aussetzen kann oder möchte, der sollte unbedingt dieses Buch aufschlagen. Denn von niemandem l&aum;ßt sich mehr lernen als von dem Schriftsteller Amos Oz -- über die schwierige Geburt des Staates Israel, über das Funktionieren und Versagen von Familien, über das, was Menschen zusammenhält, und die Abgründe, die sie trennen." - Felicitas von Lovenberg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "It is one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read. I am a great admirer of Oz as a novelist, of his spare, quiet portraits of intimacy between couples, but here, in this long book, he reveals a huge talent for the big narrative picture, for Dickensian character portraits and an expert fusion of history and personal life." - Linda Grant, The Guardian
  
  
• "It is just as much a family chronicle illuminating Jewish history over the last century, an account of the waning British mandate for Palestine, and an intimate portrait of Jerusalem during the first, austere years of the State of Israel. Interleaved with recollections of his childhood, Oz reconstructs the world of his parents and grandparents, sometimes surrendering the narrative to them. But fans of his novels, with their lean prose, may find this hard going. The writing is dense, repetitive, almost liturgical." - David Cesarani, The Independent
  
  
• "It is one of the most gripping, intense and moving autobiographies I have ever read, seamlessly translated by Nicholas de Lange." - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "(I)n many ways the best book that he has ever written (.....) The narrative line of A Tale of Love and Darkness may seem relaxed, anecdotal, occasionally repetitive, and sometimes manifestly digressive, but the book is in fact a tautly imagined whole." - Robert Alter, The New Republic
  
  
• "His memoir, in a translation that preserves the author’s gorgeous, discursive style and his love of wordplay, is a social history embedded within an autobiography. (...) (H)e richly rewards a patient audience over the bulk of this sophisticated and searing memorial." - Boris Kachka, New York
  
  
• "This is a sad book, a tale of twisted lives and stunted hopes." - Amos Elon, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "A Tale of Love and Darkness also mourns the death of the socialist-Zionist dream of a just society and a strange new nationalism, predicated on research universities and string quartets, on comparative literature and experimental agriculture, that turned instead into an acid reflux of checkpoints, demolitions, transit camps, penal colonies and strategic hamlets." - John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "It's a long book, and if it weren't as good as it is you could easily find yourself resenting its length. But you don't. It is moving, amusing, thought-provoking, brilliantly evocative. You're caught up in it from the start and swept along." - John Gross, The Telegraph
  
  
• "His new memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, presents a more expansive canvas than any of his works of fiction." - David Isaacson, The Telegraph
  
  
• "It is a universal human story, but it is also a very Jewish story, and in telling it Oz has written his best book so far. (...) I wish though that Oz had found a better title and not let his penchant for rhetoric triumph in the last paragraph; such a fine book deserved better." - Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "It is impossible to give a full account of this book's riches." - Alberto Manguel, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Die historischen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Ereignisse, die Amos Oz in seinem neuen Buch darstellt, verleihen dem Werk die Qualität einer nationalen Biografie." - Batya Gur, Die Welt

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Amos Oz's memoir is a somewhat disjointed, rambling affair -- but in the best possible way. Oz proceeds only very generally chronologically, with many often long asides, jumping back or ahead. It is a family history, too, centred around him, then his parents (he was an only child), and then that greater family beyond -- with brief mentions of his own wife and children on occasion, too.
       Oz grew up in an incredibly bookish household, with two very bookish parents, and this reading-passion grabbed hold of him as well (and wouldn't let him go, no matter how hard he tried). The focus of the book is his childhood, leading up to the decisive moment in his life, when his mother committed suicide, Amos not yet even a teenager. That it happened is revealed early on, and mentioned repeatedly, but for most of the long book Oz only takes jabs at it: it's only at the very end that he can describe in any detail what happened.
       The suicide led also to his break with his father, as Oz moved to a kibbutz (and changed his name; he was born Amos Klausner), while his father soon remarried. There's some description of Oz kibbutz years, but it is the earlier years that Oz sees as the formative ones.
       Books were a central feature in the Klausner household, and Amos' early ambition was not to become a writer but rather a book: books, he saw, seemed to stand a much better chance of survival than people. Taking to reading early on, books always played a central role in Amos' life. Already as a six year-old, it was a great day for him when his father set aside some bookshelf space for his books:

     It was an initiation rite, a coming of age.: anyone whose books are standing upright is no longer a child, he is a man.

What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

From the day of my mother's death to the day of my father's death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she had never lived. As if her life was just a censured page torn from a Soviet encyclopedia.

     I had tried to turn my back once and for all on the world of scholarship and debate from which I had come, and I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire

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Links:

• Harcourt publicity page
• Vintage publicity page
• Suhrkamp publicity page
• Profile in The Scotsman
• Interview in taz (German)
• Interview in Die Zeit (German)

• BR-online (German)
• carpe librum (German)
• A Common Reader
• Curled Up with a Good Book
• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Independent on Sunday
• JBooks.com
• liberreview
• MostlyFiction.com
• National Review
• Netzeitung.de (German)
• New York
• The New York Times Book Review
• Other/Wise
• PopMatters
• RALPH (scroll down for review)
• Silver Threads
• The Telegraph (1)
• The Telegraph (2)
• The Washington Post
• Die Welt (German)
• WoZ (German)

• The complete review's Amos Oz page

• Black Box
• How to Cure a Fanatic
• Panther in the Basement
• Rhyming Life and Death
• The Same Sea
• Scenes from Village Life
• The Story Begins
• Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

• See Index of Biographical works under review
• See Index of Israeli and Hebrew literature

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About the Author:

       Israeli author Amos Oz (עמוס עוז) was born in 1939.

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© 2005-2013 the complete review

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