Reviews

• A gripping story

  A Tale of Love and Darkness is a hilarious though serious book about the life of the author in the historical setting of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Being the great storyteller he is, Amos Oz made the true events so easy to relate to, and as such this book is remarkable. Recommended reads are: Disciples of Fortune, Survival in Auschwitz, The Union Moujik, The Usurper and Other Stories

• Eu fiquei surpresa com a oportunidade de adquirir um livro maravilhoso como este por um preço tão acessível. Fiquei muitíssimo satisfeita com isto! Comprei a obra literária já conhecendo, de antemão, através do filme.

• To be honest , I did not like the book, I only read a few pages. I had to buy it for my class. But I'm here to show you that the product I got was very good and durable

• Libro straordinario. Da essere letto e riletto. Un perfetto quadro sia storico che dell animo umano. Un piacere leggerlo in lingua inglese.

• This is the first Amos Oz book I have ever read and now it's one of my favorite books! I can't believe that I haven't discovered this author before. I've read some of the other less enthusiastic reviews, which state that the book is too long winded and "descriptive." So here are some of my thoughts - but please note that I come from Central Europe, so the book may resonate more with me given my cultural background: - The book doesn't have a "plot" as such. It is like a painting - it paints the life of a young boy (the author) growing up in post World War II Israel. In a way, each chapter is like a painting of a memory. There is a progression in the sense that the boy grows up into a young man who ends up on a Kibbutz, and later a famous author, but there is not action plot so to speak. - The beauty of the book is really in the language. Reading it is like reading poetry, the word "mellifluous" comes to mind. I consider myself well read in all the usual classics, but I have to say that this is the first time in a long time that I've enjoyed reading a book just for the pleasure of reading the words. Some of the other reviews mentioned that the author is too descriptive - but the words flow and it's almost like listening to music, you just have to relax into it. There's a purposes to the lists of adjectives. I normally do not enjoy descriptive books, I have no patience with the likes of Dickens or Tolstoy, but this was fantastic. - The intellectual interest of the book is in the implicit commentary on the social and political situation in Israel. The author does not offer an explicit analysis, but as you watch him grow up, he offers his immediate personal reflections on what is happening around him. This is also done with a lot of wit - it's not "haha" funny, but there is a dry sort of humor to the author's observations, which is partly due to the childlike innocence of a growing boy trying to make sense of sometimes an absurd and difficult reality. Including his mother's suicide and the community's reaction to it. Once in a while the author does get explicit and offers a future point of view commentary on Arab-Israeli relations. Overall, I found this fascinating, because the author succeeds in "evoking an era" so to speak. - I also found this book interesting as someone who comes from Central / Eastern Europe, because the story of Israel's independence is also a story of Jewish people who came there from this area. The characters the author describes could have come from my own family - the kind of literature they read, the intellectual topics they are interested in, the social manners, the role of children and adults and the sexes, their ideals, their reluctant acquiescence to live in a new kind of a country in the Middle East...it all reminded me of home. So I think that those of you who share this cultural heritage will really pick up on the nuances of this book. It's almost like Stefan Zweig's "A World of Yesterday," another one of my favorites. Overall, an excellent book. I was going to see the Natalie Portman movie version, but now I don't think I will, I can't see how someone could turn such a book into a two hour movie. It's a book you really need to think and imagine your way through.

• Thank you ! Great

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