Sunday, December 04, 2005
Panther in the Basement – Amos Oz
This has been knocking around for years. I couldn’t have paid full price for it, it’s a slim thing, I’d heard of the author but this is far from his best-known work: I must have picked it up for a knock-down price. Eventually I got round to it. It was nice and light, and I thought that in addition to the non-fiction I’d been reading about the Middle East a novel might be nice. I took it to Prague, it was small and light enough to justify inclusion in my flight bag.
The plot: a young boy in the last days of the British mandate in Palestine learns about betrayal, or rather, he learns how complex betrayal can be. It’s a convincing, generous, portrait of the edge of adolescence, and brings some humanity to that most frustrating argument, the whole Israel-Palestine thing.
Most of it I read as I waited for the flight home to take off. We were delayed by snow. Prague’s nice, isn’t it? We saw a woodpecker.
UPDATE: Prague photos here.
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This has been knocking around for years. I couldn’t have paid full price for it, it’s a slim thing, I’d heard of the author but this is far from his best-known work: I must have picked it up for a knock-down price. Eventually I got round to it. It was nice and light, and I thought that in addition to the non-fiction I’d been reading about the Middle East a novel might be nice. I took it to Prague, it was small and light enough to justify inclusion in my flight bag.
The plot: a young boy in the last days of the British mandate in Palestine learns about betrayal, or rather, he learns how complex betrayal can be. It’s a convincing, generous, portrait of the edge of adolescence, and brings some humanity to that most frustrating argument, the whole Israel-Palestine thing.
Most of it I read as I waited for the flight home to take off. We were delayed by snow. Prague’s nice, isn’t it? We saw a woodpecker.
UPDATE: Prague photos here.
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