Shiri Artzi, “Stories from the separation”, Kinneret, Zamora Dvir, p. 319
a ski vacation, including loss of virginity, in Salt Lake City; Orgasm in the Florentine (meaning a cocktail at a bar, “something with a name like ‘Orgasm’ or ‘Nirvana’ or some other generic nonsense that promises eternal happiness for forty-seven shekels”); bachelor apartment of an aging pianist in Givataim – that is, he is only 40 years old but he and the young woman in front of him It seems almost like the end of life (“And you recognize tablets against hemorrhoids and a special toothpaste against receding gums, and pills against heartburn, and you notice that he doesn’t have plasters and iodine, and you wonder if that’s how it is when you don’t have children, you don’t need plasters and iodine. And you close the closet, and go From there, I know that your wound will heal even without them”); A wedding dress shop at 99 Dizengoff, of all the addresses in the world (in that movie by Avi Nesher, everyone slept with everyone else and were, as described by others in the book, “beautiful from youth, beautiful from possibilities, and light and light, weightless like butterflies, like dragonflies, almost transparent from frenzy, Their skin is smooth and glowing and their faces flicker in the colored light beaming at them from their mobile screens.” Only that Anat Atzmon, Gidi Gov and their friends in the film did not yet have mobile phones); a tantra workshop for couples in a kibbutz in the Galilee, which is supposed to bring together but in the end alienates; one-star hotels.
The stories from the breakup of Shiri Artzi take place (and some of them only almost happen) in many different places, “outside the land of my life” but certainly also inside it. The types of breakups are diverse, with and without sex, with and without second-consciousness substances, lighter and less, with a happy ending ( Who really decides?) or without an end. With almost detective questions like “Where did the end begin?” And quotes from the narrator’s grandfather, such as “as long as the candle is lit, you can fix it” (really?), and feelings like “it’s like a tomato and cucumber mixed in a salad, and since they’re mixed it’s hard to remember what they taste like separately”.
“Tinder is ticking on my phone like a bomb,” says the narrator in the “Tinder” story, and soon confesses: “I’m flipping through…excitement and reluctance, disgust and amusement,” when she discovers that “there are countless items in this store.” She also learns that rejection on the dating app Popularity doesn’t hurt. “And because onion rings are offended when someone prefers chips over them?” She wonders rhetorically and gives herself marks on her outward appearance, and then gets a little involved with it. “If I value myself as a ‘seven’ (I think I was once eight and a half, but it was around the same time Fellini was), then I will never choose someone who in my eyes is a six, and there is no point in choosing an eight either because most likely he will not choose me” .
Divorced-divorced, single-single (one of the groups on Facebook is called “Vibrant POP”), lost and lost and those who grow lies “like a secret pet”, swirl between the pages of the book, in stories some of which are short novels, and which are all fun, excellent and brave, each one on his way
In the story “Comzitz”, two newly separated people find themselves, like others in the collection, “walking stunned among the fragments, trying to understand what happened and how to start over”. After he checks if she is “available for transport”, they together give birth to “a mutant baby of two heartbreaks mixed together”, and after a failed sexual attempt are freed to engage in “what actually turned us on the most – a tumultuous verbal copulation that included an HD resolution analysis of the collapse of our married life “.
The heroines of my country lead the way but also enjoy being led, like the one on “Tinder” who lets her experienced girlfriend be her teacher of the awkward in the new world that has opened up to her. “There is something pleasant about being led. It’s like coming to India and meeting an Israeli who has been traveling there for two months and immediately upgrades your conditions, takes you to an improved guest house and explains to you that the place you’ve been until now is a den of bedbugs.”
About another heroine, the narrator writes “her ego hurt”. The word “humiliation” repeats several times and in several forms. It turns out that it is not easy to start a new life in the middle of life, but here and there there are pleasant surprises, like in the beautiful story “Inventor”. A possible adventure flashed through her nostrils and for a moment she was dizzy. When she opened her eyes, her body shook with a vibration of excitement and from her pupils a sixteen-year-old girl who wanted to celebrate winked at her and she smiled at her, and despite her sobriety, grief and gravity, she let her lead.” Again the matter of transportation, without which you probably don’t get anywhere.
Artzi’s language is rich and teeming, ranging from quotations from Frost and Emily Dickinson, and mentions of feminist masterpieces such as “The Golden Notebook” by Doris Lessing (who hated being labeled a feminist writer, but no one apparently asked her) and a poem inspired by the aging pianist for example (“It It seems as if the moon improvises melodies on the water with the fingers of light”), folk phrases like “his ex-wife slaughters him with food”, or just a longing for Sabih.
Like a bride on an Austrian honeymoon who tries to decipher the other couples in the complex, so Artzi is good at characterizing characters and types, breathing life into seemingly generic archetypes and stereotypes. She weaves in the descriptions of the new bourgeois, with this one’s famous cherry tomato and onion quiche and the other’s expected gifts (a couple’s massage at a new Japanese spa or sweatpants made of breathable fabric, for those who have recently joined a running group). “Like a lack of iron, so she has a lack of ambition,” she writes about someone, and it seems not about herself, at least not according to this ambitious book, although too many years have passed since her powerful debut novel, “Mud”, and perhaps it should be Stimulate her to more ambition so that we win more books from her desk with increased frequency.