On the strength of "The Liberated Bride", superbly translated into english, I would guess A. B. Yehoshua may be the best Israeli novelist on the market. Yes, better than Amos Oz - notwithstanding his wonderful memoir, "Tales of Love and Darkness" - not to mention David Grossman - whom I do not really know - or Aharon Appelfeld - who seems to write more about Europe than Israel. The hero of the book, Rivlin, is a fumbling orientalist deeply in love with his wife, a district court judge in Haifa. I do not recall a funnier, more perceptive account of a happy marriage as Yehoshua provides in this book. His dialogue is masterful, with a magnificent ability to convey subtle changes of mood and tone. Rivlin, the professor, is obsessed with piercing the secret of his son's divorce. This search drives the plot, but the book is really about relations between arabs and jews, love and marriage, life in the Holy Land circa 1999 and slight episodes of a humdrum middle class life which Yehoshua manages to capture through small details and to describe with a light touch and a great comical gift. Episode by episode, he manages to hold the reader's attention to a story which seems to be nothing at all. I wonder what an arab reader would make of his take on the arabs - mostly Israeli arabs, fluent in Hebrew. Would they find it patronizing or, on the contrary, humane?
