This book, marketed with the intriguing tagline "Sex! Heavy Metal! Linguistics!", is an attempt to relate English readers to
everyday life in the war-ridden Israel of the early 21st century, a struggle for normality based, of all places, in an insane asylum. The narrator, Gilad himself, is a self-aware mediocrity champion, employed as a nurse in such a facility outside Jerusalem and expecting his life of not much more. Most of the novel is focused on the everyday events in and around the asylum and the narrator's private life, lacking a plot in the classical sense of the word.The main themes in the book include everyday Israeli life, and Gilad's three main interests, mentioned in the tagline above. All four are intertwined in a quite interesting way, and the
reader can expect many jumps between Black Sabbath, 80's movie
culture in Israel, and improper use of adverbs. The
characters are well-thought and diverse, and make the messages Cleverly-placed motifs pop their heads every once in a while, and the overall reading is enjoyable.One kind of people is less likely to enjoy this book: Israelis. The target audience of this book is clearly the Western English reader. To the Hebrew speaker (such as yours truly) most related linguistic observations seem basic. Jokes about Israeli everyday life are well-known and expected by natives, or immigrants of a decade or more. Some characters (like Carmel, the narrator's girlfriend, a left-wing radical) are reduced to stereotypes in the eyes of those who know them. And last but not least, some generalizations made in the book are simply untrue (one must mention the completely wrong "fact" that Israeli Arabs have a
different color ID card than Jews) and upsetting. However, like I mentioned, for non-Israelis interested in a different culture, in the various thoughts of people in a very confusing area of this world, this is a good book to read.
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