As short fiction goes, this was mighty fine, up to a point. Oz's eye for the human foible and his ability to draw the reader right into the middle of the lives of his characters is awesome. I started each of these stories of ordinary people in the century-old pioneer village of Tel Ilan eager to meet the mayor, the librarian, the doctor...and I feel I know them all so well now. And yet each story left me unsettled and bewildered...what, in the name of G-d is he trying to tell us, after all? Wives wander off without explanation...go to visit a sister and just never come back, or leave a note "Don't worry about me", and disappear. A woman waits for the arrival of a nephew she's been told to expect...he doesn't come, and finally she just eats the warmed up dinner she had prepared and goes off to bed, after mithering for hours about what she should do. A man feels drawn to a room where a young boy took his own life years before...why? Another young man seems to be sliding down a path to that ultimate despair...but then again, is he just experiencing normal teenaged angst and hormonal upheaval? Always an ending that resolves nothing, explains nothing, suggests nothing. Of course, I often feel that way about short fiction. It's why I read so little of it. I don't think I understand the point of so much of it, even when it's as marvelously written as these examples are. ( )

Need to see what others rated it so highly for and what I missed. To me this was a disjointed collection of narratives taking place in a bucolic Israeli village that is on the cusp of change and modernization/monetization. As a result, bizarre things are happening (a stranger comes to town and crawls into bed with an old lady, the mayor's wife disappears, there are sounds of digging from underneath the teacher's house, but no evidence of it. None of it is ever resolved or explained. There are tensions between old and new, and considerable consternation about an Arab student living/working on the teacher's farm (and ironing her underwear) and I get that all of this is probably an undercurrent of fear of change and latent nationalism, and is billed as "a memorable novel in stories" with "unsettling glimpses of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life" but I just couldn't grasp it as a whole. ( )

Just that. Vignettes of life in an old Israeli village. Lives loosely intersect where everyone knows everyone else. The text is lyrical and evocative with characters vividly drawn - the affable mayor, friend to all but distant to his wife, the former MK suspicious of the Arab student lodger, and hearing digging under foot at night. Some characters, especially women, yearn to break away. Others, mainly men, yearn to hold on to the past. You can feel the sun beating down, hear the wind through the cypress trees, hear the night sounds of dogs barking and, sometimes, shots ringing out. Somewhere close there is strife and villages that are not so "normal" as the last story describes; but here are ordinary village lives. ( )

This is a very delicate little book, in which nothing much seems to be happening - we get seven snippets from the ordinary lives of ordinary people in a village called Tel Ilan, created as a farming community by Jewish pioneers a century ago, and now slowly turning into a "beauty spot". The characters from each story pop up in the background of one or two of the others, but there isn't anything like a connected plot; even within the stories themselves there's no conventional dramatic resolution. And there are borderline strange things going on that are never quite explored or explained. But we learn a good deal from the "throwaway" background details about how small communities work, about families, about the state of Israel and its relationship with its history, about art and work and culture, about life and death and old age, and much else.

Another writer I will have to read more of. And almost a motivation to try to learn Hebrew... ( )

This is a book of fragments, there are seven tales and a coda in this book, and what you get are glimpses into the lives of the inhabitants of the fictional village of Tel Ilan, just a short bus hop from Tel Aviv. This is starting to become an issue as it’s distance and it’s beauty makes it an ideal setting for the smart set to move in with their money and chic boutiques, pricing out the locals. This is merely one of the backdrops to what is a strange and disturbing book, all the more so for being beautifully written.

It is as though we pop into a moment of these characters day and then go on our way with no conclusion beyond a slight ache, as though we had just received acupuncture, with a series of question marks, there is a disquiet, a sense of unease that permeates ones conscious and remains there nagging, a slight nuisance pricking at the edges of your perception.

In the first tale Arieh Zelnik, lives with his 90 year old mother and one day a stranger turns up, a lawyer with some news for him, from this simple premise the story slowly gets stranger and stranger until?

In another, Dr Gili Steiner goes to meet her nephew of the bus. The bus arrives without him, the Dr becomes distressed and searches for him whilst reminiscing about their past together, her angst increases as her attempt fails.

In Strangers, Kobi Ezra, a 17 year old loner, is infatuated with the librarian - a 30 year old divorcee - who is seeing a truck driver, this is a tale that is both tortuous and touching as he strives to make his feelings known.

This is a slight glimpse into this small patch of Eden, where the natives seem to live lives of quiet despair..

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/scenes-from-village-lifeamos-oz.htm... ( )