I read one Amos Oz novel years ago, I’m not even sure which one. It made an impression on me of strong writing control and sensory involvement, but I found the setting, an Israeli kibbutz, sufficiently obscure to keep me from reading any more of his. Quite why the mind gets interested in something is an abiding mystery – recently my fascination for Oz and his work has grown. Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams, the documentary, reinforced that desire, so I grabbed his latest novel, Rhyming Love and Death, and whipped through it in a couple of days.
Whipped through is the operative phrase. Rhyming Love and Death is only 160 sparse pages long, and there is definitely an air of this being a slight project. The book’s first person narrator, an aging writer attending a reading of his works in a community hall, latches onto the young woman actually doing the reading (apparently there the author doesn’t do his own reading, merely takes questions from the audience), a timid dormouse of a girl. Or does this even take place? For the narrator is forever imagining characters based on the people he comes into contact with. His creative mind spins outlandish yarns from mere impressions, yarns that keep expanding and interlinking. The book’s anchoring plotline could well be the same, a story made up, and who knows?
In other words, Amos Oz spends the novel toying with the reader, showing how creativity can work, illuminating the uneasy juxtaposition of reality (in this case a rather sordid reality) and fiction. Along the way, he asks questions about the point of writing, about what writing can do.
I’m not normally taken with metafiction of this sort, and Rhyming Love and Death smacks a little of playful diversion. But I enjoyed the book immensely. Why, I cannot really say. Oz’s language has a soundtrack of its own, discursive yet pointed, observational yet philosophical. Above all, he captures the melancholy of the driven outsider, the writer forever locked in a cage of creative distance. Subtle mastery is at work here and I will now seek one of his older, famous novels.