Status
Available
Genres
Collections
Publication
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 376 pages
Description
Past Continuousis a brilliant tour de force, a Joycean panorama of the lives of three men, their families, their lovers, and their friends in the quintessentially modern city of Tel Aviv. It is as much a novel about Tel Aviv-its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere, and its history-as it is about the human condition.
User reviews
LibraryThing member -Eva-
Past Continuous follows three friends - Goldman, Israel, and Caesar - through their physical and mental meanders through Tel Aviv, discussing its inhabitants, its landscape, and its history. It is considered one of the peaks of modern Hebrew fiction, often compared to the scope of Remembrance of
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Things Past (which the original Hebrew title, זכרון דברים, also nods at). Not only is the novel a literary tour de force, but reading it can also be one, due to its long, complex sentences (some spanning several pages), which roam from one topic to another (albeit in a remarkably unambiguous way) linking one character to another, however disparate they seem, as if they are all part of the whole - a commune with every single character a member. The story is about a seemingly endless tangle of family relations (keep a notebook at hand if you want to keep track) and convoluted relationships, their arbitrary feuds replaced by happenstance friendships or love-affairs, all clad in a shadowy existential angst where not much contentment is to be found, or even seriously sought. Show Less
Subjects
Original publication date
1977
ISBN
3596121256 / 9783596121250