It all starts with a few pistachio shells, which found themselves in a place they didn’t belong and started a riot that would change the lives of all the main characters – some of them characters that wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it weren’t for those shells, which make another appearance (including the pistachios themselves) towards the end, in an internal homage and closing a circle for themselves . It is tempting to think that Jonathan Yavin is trying to tell us something about how most things in life are as important as the pistachio shell (and of course the importance of what is important is revealed too late); that the world we live in is as easy to crack as a pistachio, and not as complicated as it seems; And above all, we are all temporary and quite unnecessary like chewed husks, and we will all end up in one garbage can or another anyway, so why not celebrate a little until then.
But of course he will understand more sophisticated than that. In a dizzying novel to the point of a headache (in a good part) about a particularly deranged 50-year-old crisis, which he self-published and with the cheers of going free near his 50th birthday, it is hard not to get swept away in his own pleasure, especially in the unique and enviable professional freedom given to the hero he created. The radio broadcaster Shaul (Soli) Naaman, who is true to himself at levels that border on suicide, analyzes the news reality to which he is required as a presenter of a daily and topical morning program fearlessly, defiantly, fiercely and probably also with insensitivity to the madness of greatness (“I am armed only with my vocal cords, even that they frighten them more than any weapon”). With one outburst, addressed to Defense Minister Timna Ashad (also there), he loses his world at the station, and his world in general, and finds himself involuntarily unemployed (“Now the morning was his enemy”), but it is hard to believe from which statements he escaped unscathed before Yes, for 30 years of broadcasting (and entertainment).
A random list of Naaman’s quotes in his program, as they appear at the beginning of each episode.
On “Schindler’s List”: “The Holocaust was really beautiful. For a moment I regretted missing it.” On Dana International (in 1998, long before J.K. Rowling and others discovered that it is not recommended to risk the crisis of the trans community): “On the contrary, what is – or is not – between her legs, is certainly of interest to the public. There, every story of our erection is embodied the national”.
On Eric Einstein, the saint of saints: “What is the great disaster? A singer died, quite old, enough to inflate the matter to the death of Israelis. She died a long time ago, the poor thing, if she even lived. And this is actually my problem with Einstein: he was the soundtrack of a fiction , of an ideal empty of content”.
On the murder of Rehabam (Gandhi) Zeevi: “This is a holiday for sanity.” And about the attack on the Twin Towers: “I admit: I also felt a hint of dark joy when I watched the second plane hit the tower… There was a kind of sense of justice for the punishment suffered by arrogant America. Deep down, I’m probably a dormant terrorist too. And you?”
Goodbye America, but there will surely be readers who will feel a sense of justice for the punishment that arrogant Naaman will suffer, and he will suffer, poor man. A professional provocateur, a kind of rogue spy for the rich, stingy, treacherous, embittered and quite unbearable overall, but also unforgettable. A figure for the pantheon. Some will see him as brave, “even though courage is often what remains at the bottom of the barrel. That’s why it is so similar to stupidity.” and his language. The language he understands equips him with, which brings his teenage and estranged daughter to ask him in despair: “Can’t you ever talk like a normal human being?” (In the same conversation, one of the most successful jokes in the book, in my eyes, is recorded: “I once knew someone who died because she was specific”).
This language is the real hero of this book. Because as much as Naaman can shorten the fuse for others, how can one be truly angry with someone who asks his young son: “Please, not with a clenched fist. Straighten your index finger and load the food on the fork like a forklift in the port of Glasgow”? Or refuses to go to a football game because “the Lord Adi never wore a tribune butt all his life”. And how can one not like Yavin’s writing when he describes his hero’s language with these words: “His eloquent speech, his armor against intimacy (…) combines a loud tongue sprinkled here and there with a taunting word, with an intonation that soars in a sultry head and lands in a dramatic sipa, in a sharp diction that is careful To separate word from word and avoid assimilation mines.” I would like to personally thank Yavin for all the assimilation mines that he generously scattered, for words and terms of the past that sent me shivers of awkward and uncontrollable nostalgia, from “Luxus” and “What are you doing” and the wax museum in Migdal Shalom to Stok’s Medicinal brandy, and also for contemporary illuminations More like the one on Facebook: “I suspect that this tool is not intended to relieve loneliness but rather for perfection.”
Another unforgettable character is Tali Kalifa, the editor of Naaman’s program. She speaks fluently, with zero patience for bullshit, and is smarter than everyone else. About Naaman’s special program she says: “People came to the circus and left after the lion devoured the trainer.” When she advises Naaman to “let the listeners understand points on their own, lower the pathos. Less is more”, and in short, accuses him of overkill, I suspect that Havin meant a little to himself. He surely knows that he is guilty of overcrowding, sometimes presses too hard on the laugh pedal and does not stop trying to prove how brilliant he is, many miles after we have already witnessed his brilliance and even (slightly) tired of it.
Towards the end of the novel, the center of which can be summed up without spoilers in the statement of one of the characters, that “happily married” is only an oxymoron, the scorer realizes for a moment a hole in my heart (as he writes about Naaman who scored a hole in his daughter’s heart) and introduced an element that was almost completely absent until then: a soul . In the closing sentence of the acknowledgments paragraph, he has already reached the level of a soulful soul, which is definitely a bonus when it comes to a story that begins with a pile of pistachio shells.