SPL Reads!

The Avid Readers group convened on a cold Thursday night to enjoy some light refreshments and discuss A. B. Yehoshua’s novel A Woman in Jerusalem. 

The novel is the story of a Russian born woman who dies in a bombing in Jerusalem.  The only means of identifying her body after the blast is a pay stub from a bakery where the woman was briefly employed.  A muckraking newspaper reporter prints a scathing article about the bakery’s supposed inhumanity to its employees for allowing the woman’s body to lay unclaimed and unidentified in a morgue for so long.  Wracked both by guilty feelings and the bad publicity generated by the article, the bakery’s owner charges the human resources manager with the task of locating and notifying the dead woman’s family of the tragedy.

Slowly, this somewhat unusual assignment develops into a mission that finds the human resources manager travelling to a remote village in a former Soviet republic.  Along the way, the novel becomes a meditation on some very heavy topics, among which are questions about humanity, compassion, and responsibility to our fellow citizens.  A Woman in Jerusalem is somewhat enigmatic and doesn’t offer any easy answers.  Like the characters in the novel, the readers are forced to draw their own conclusions about the validity of the human resources manager’s mission and the degree to which he is successful.

Our opinions about A. B. Yehoshua’s novel ran lukewarm.  On one hand, we felt that the novel was inventive and brought up some important ideas, but we also felt that it was somewhat flawed in its execution.  One group member felt that the novel suffered from repetitiveness and was slightly annoyed that the characters were referred to by their titles or roles in the plot rather than with proper names.  As a group we felt that some of the intricacies were probably lost in the cultural translation.

The Avid  Readers will meet again on Thursday February 7 to discuss Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, a novel set in World War II and narrated by Death himself.  Join us for what promises to be a lively discussion about an interesting book.