Number 6 - Minotaur - Benjamin Tammuz

Managed to finish book number 6 with 2 minutes to go before midnight, so I've oficially just done 6 books in January alone. Not too shabby, and well on track now to beat last year's total.

I picked this up in Waterstone's late last year mainly for the title, read the blurb and decided it seemed interesting enough to give it a shot.

An Israeli secret agent, on his 41st birthday, sees ands falls in love with a girl slightly less than half his age.  He starts writing to her anonymously and a weird relationship forms between them.

This book has a very weird structure.  the opening chapter, details the first sighting, followed by a selection of the letters that he sends to her, and some of the replies that she writes back, whether she has a way of replying or not. This section covers nearly a decade and we learn of two other men in her life in this time.

A dramatic incident ends this chapter.

Chapter 2 then jumps back in time and follows the life of the first of the men in her life.  Chapter three jumps further back again and follows the second man in her life, and the final, longest chapter, follows the secrret agent, Alexander Abramov, through his whole life up to and including the events of chapter 1.

This means segments of the story are repeated two and even 3 times from differing viewpoints.  But despite knowing what's coming, the book stays compulsive and manages to raise tension impressively well.  The opening chapter is one of the most weirdly disturbing things I've read outside of the horror genre.

This is a novel about love, and hope, and dashed hopes and life and death, and it juggles these themes brilliantly.

The narration is cool and calm throughout. One of the reviews on the back compares this to Kafka (who is name checked a couple of times especially in chapter 1) and I can certainly see where that's coming from. The prose is a little clunky in places, one of the traits of most translated novels IMHO, but nothing that truly detracts from the power of the story being told.

I'm not entirely certain what, if any genre, this belongs in.  I have a feeling that the final chapter might have been more compelling to me if I knew more about Israel/Palestine history as it did slump ever so slightly in the middle of this section. However, it gave an interesting history lesson (although of limited scope) and some insights into a piece of history I confess to being mostly ignorant about.

This is another early contender for book of the year.  i will be picking up more work by this writer.  To write with this structure and still surprise the reader in the later chapters is a real talent.

easy 8.5/10.  This is a minor masterpiece.