Her Body Knows: Two Novellas - Hardcover

Grossman, David

3.65

668 ratings by Goodreads

9780374175573: Her Body Knows: Two Novellas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374175578 ISBN 13: 9780374175573

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

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A fevered storyteller and a captive audience revisit the past together in each of David Grossman's new novellas, trying to make sense of a betrayal that neither one can put to rest.

In "Frenzy," reserved, respectable Shaul lets his sister-in-law, Esti, into a secret nightmare, as he reveals to her his conviction that his wife is having an affair. Along with Esti, we find ourselves trapped in his paranoia and desperation as we accompany the odd pair down Israel’s highways on a journey that reveals a passion perverted by jealousy and self-loathing.

In the title story, a successful but embittered novelist visits her mother, who is in the last stages of cancer. Grossman investigates the powers of storytelling to harm and heal as the daughter reads aloud her own imagined, merciless account of her mother's love affair with a much younger teenage boy. Gradually it becomes clear that, for all its anger, the daughter’s story and the writing process itself have led her to a new appreciation of her mother's difficult character, and her own.

Studies in obssession, claustrophobia, and the need to confess, these two novellas mark a new departure from "a writer who has been, for nearly two decades, the one of the most original and talented ... anywhere." (The New York Times Book Review).

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About the Author:

David Grossman is the author of six novels and two works of journalism. He lives in Jerusalem.

From Publishers Weekly:

Love has many guises in these two novellas—but it never looks like something you'd aspire to. Israeli writer Grossman is more interested in its perverse forms—jealousy, egocentrism, obsession, voyeurism—but also the ways in which we invent the people we love through fantasy. In "Frenzy," Shaul, a respectable academic, feverishly stalks his wife, Elisheva, convinced she has been having an affair with another man for 10 years. He asks his sister-in-law, Esti, to drive him across the country in the middle of the night in search of Elisheva, and as he describes a decade of watching and waiting and imagining every last detail of Elisheva's betrayal, Esti finds herself getting pulled into Shaul's obsession. In "In Another Life," a writer named Rotem visits her estranged mother, Nili, now dying from cancer. Rotem shares her latest story, a fictional exploration of an episode from her childhood in which her mother is the central character. As Rotem reads aloud, Grossman switches back and forth from Rotem's story to the present moment. The reader sees Nili, and then sees her as Rotem imagines her, while the narrative hovers somewhere between memory and fiction. Grossman (See Under: Love, etc.) can capture surprising psychological depth in a single sentence, and here he opens up whole lives on every page.
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