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Friendly Fire. By A.B (2007)

by Yehoshua(Favorite Author)

3.58 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1905559194 (ISBN13: 9781905559190)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Peter Halban

review 1: Friendly Fire / A. B. Yehoshua. This contemporary Israeli is a sometime favorite writer of mine. And this novel is at the top of the list. Tale of a Tel Aviv couple, sixtyish, who are apart for a week when the wife visits her widower brother-in-law in Tanzania. The author alternates brief sections between the two, touching upon issues of family, death, and professional life. The husband is an engineer whose firm designs elevators, which makes for an interesting subplot. There is a variety of characters of all ages and lifestyles. Lots of authentic relationships, intelligent parallels, and clever riffs on the title.
review 2: I also found this book when looking for another by the author; the synopsis is not engaging enough to make it first choice. It is a... more slow paced story and most of it is about everyday concerns of family, work, ageing and coping with grief. The author has done an excellent job of making those everyday concerns into a compelling narrative.There are two story lines following an elderly couple: the wife on a trip to visit her widowed brother-in-law in Tanzania and the husband at home in Tel Aviv with a problematic noisy lift shaft. The couple have rarely been separated for this length of time and switching backwards and forwards between the two shows how close they are, even when apart.There are a lot of cultural, historical, nationalistic and religious undertones to the book, some treated subtly and others in quite a heavy-handed way. The strands of family loyalty and anthropology are (obviously) the micro and macro manifestation of caring about humanity, both are more important than an individual nation. Yumi (the brother-in-law) has taken his detachment from nation too far and also detached himself from family and, it seems, all living humans. The mutant elephant perhaps (subtly) represents a different way of seeing, which is rare but also valuable (people pay to see the elephant). The lift problem shows several people who say they want to solve it, but who spend far too much of their time apportioning blame. The lift shaft is in Tel Aviv, a place where Israeli-Palestinian tension has often been high, (too obvious?). The book is called "Friendly Fire", which is a dreadful or dread-filled phrase, and an incidence of friendly fire drives the characters and the narrative. When we learn the circumstances which caused this incident, they are both sad and banal, which somehow makes it more dreadful. less

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