My Michael

`One should present the great and simple things, like desire and death.' These are the words of Amoz Oz who, in his early thirties, is one of the most original and highly regarded of the new Israeli writers. And nothing has done so much to establish his reputation as My Michael, his latest and most impressive novel. Set in modern Jerusalem, the story is narrated by Hannah Gonen, the wife of a geologist at the Hebrew University. Neither in her outward way of life nor in her relations with Michael, her husband, is she fulfilled. She withdraws into a private world of fantasies made up of her childhood memories and suppressed desires, a prison of isolation to which Michael has no access and from which he cannot release her. It is the contrast between Hannah's inward sense of alienation and the perfectly normal circumstances of her social life that the author portrays so percep-tively. The range of his imagination and the varied rhythms of his prose leave a powerful, disturbing impression which the reader will not easily forget.