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Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a novel that "broke all the barriers...sexually explicit yet dense with biblical allusions and psychological insight," Love Life unbuttoned Hebrew literature and spent four months as Israel's number one best-seller. What begins as a story of a young married woman's turbulent affair with an older man rapidly devolves into a feverish, lyrical crash course in the anatomy of obsession. When Yaara meets Aryeh, her father's boyhood friend, she is instantly drawn to his impassive and archly assured presence. It is not long before she forsakes her devoted and well-meaning husband for the powerful, mysterious older man who seems to embody all that she lacks: will, strength, and the key to her parents' inaccessible pasts. They embark on a heated affair that soon spirals toward the destructive as Yaara finds that the things in Aryeh that attract her also repel her with equal intensity. With shocking immediacy, Shalev lays bare Yaara's struggle to navigate extreme terrain ranging from the sublime to the grotesque, the sacred to the profane, the liberating to the all-consuming. Love Life is cerebral, seductive, provocative, and profound.… (more)
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It would be easy to dismiss Ya'arah as just an immoral woman who cheats on her husband, but at the root is her parents' relationship, her infant brother's death, her unsuccessful marriage (indeed a poor copy of her parents' unhappy marriage), and all the secrets that surround her. Her parents are a mystery to her and when Aryeh shows up with his intimate link to both of them (the details of which he is very reluctant to reveal), Ya'arah is immediately fascinated and her obsession starts.
This is very much a psychological novel, but there are also huge amounts of religious and literary references that could keep a scholar busy for a long time. Indeed, I was wishing I was back at University when I read it, because I could think of so many topics to write on.
This is a dark psychological study of a woman who is trying to understand herself, the two men in her life, and her parents. Written very densely in long paragraphs with no quotation marks, the prose looked as if it would be hard to read. It didn't turn out to be that way. I realized that the way the story was written never bothered me at all because I was so captivated by how it was told - more than a little bit sexy, sort of scary, but, most of all, deeply sad.
I liked that this novel was different than most other stories of love, but I would have preferred a more definite ending. I'll live with the one I got, though, as I'm pretty sure I know what will happen next.