Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz
Rhyming Life and Death is set in Tel Aviv during one night in the early 1980s, and concerns a man we know only as ‘the Author’, who spins fiction from his surroundings to pass the time. The Author is a famous middle-aged novelist, who happens also to be an accountant — a contrast suggesting that his artistic life is an intensely private matter which he deliberately keeps hidden beyond a functional day-to-day persona. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, he is not looking forward to the evening ahead, since he is to deliver a talk at a nearby community centre, and expects to be assailed with the usual questions about his writing habits and what he considers to be the meaning of his work.
In a café before the event, he concocts a tragic past for the voluptuous waitress, whom he names Ricky and equips with a faithless ex-boyfriend and a life of quiet despair. Later, when he is being introduced at the community centre, he relieves the boredom by inventing names and histories for several members of the audience: ‘Arnold Bartok’, as he titles one person, is an unemployed courier who shares a bed with his incontinent mother; ‘Yuval Dahan’ is an angsty young poet manqué, desperate to gain the Author’s support; ‘Yerucham Shdemati’, the host of the event, is, the Author decides, dying from a blood disease.
So far, fact and fiction are neatly divided, but as events proceed, the lines between the two start to blur. Part of the lecture involves a reading from the Author’s work, which is given by a woman named Rochele Reznik. Despite not finding her particularly attractive, the Author flirts with her afterwards, but although Rochele is awed by him, she puts him off and goes home alone. The story, and the Author himself, then drifts around, and one is no longer quite sure what is truly happening and what is being imagined. After he has walked about for a while, the Author returns to Rochele’s apartment and seduces her — but this conquest is almost certainly something he merely fantasises about during his traipsing, not a real encounter.
The lines soon blur even more. Amos Oz focuses in this book on the relationship between fact and fiction, between reader and author — and, indeed, between ‘author’ and ‘Author’. Both Oz and his protagonist draw attention to the artificiality of this story; at one stage the Author addresses his characters, reminding them of their illusory nature, and later even the Author himself is acknowledged not to be real. The book asks us why we read, why we believe in what we read, and whether the bridge between the real and the imaginary can ever be defined — which leads to one of the most basic literary questions: What exactly is a work of fiction?
In this novella the Author is a Leopold Bloom-like figure, a flâneur who wanders the lamplit passageways, beset by insecurity; like Bloom, he suffers impotence during sex, though not while he is alone, which here could serve as a slightly quirky metaphor for artistic talent: the Author is most capable when in solitude. However, while Rhyming Life and Death is a decent, one-sitting read, it is, in spite of the weighty areas it touches, a slight piece of work, one which skips across the surface of postmodernism without ever diving in. Many writers, from B. S. Johnson back to Laurence Sterne, have injected the banter between novelist, characters and reader with more humour, while Joyce, Woolf and others have brought far greater depth and verbal texture to their characters’ interior musings.
Some of the imagined scenarios are interesting, but occasionally — in particular when the Author is glancing around the community centre — the book reads like the transcript of a parlour game that was more diverting for the participant than it is for us. There are also some oddities with the two main characters (if one can talk about ‘character’ in a work which deliberately places itself outside the usual confines of storytelling). During what he apparently intends to be a gentle wooing of Rochele, the Author is in fact creepy and insinuating, more like a sex-pest than a potential suitor, while Rochele is, throughout, meek beyond the point of absurdity. Of course, this could be an essential part of the Author’s fantasies: it would certainly tie in with the fact that most of his other cerebral flights are fairly misanthropic. The lives he invents for strangers are filled with pain and humiliation; it is almost as if the impotent Author is seeking to atone for his weakness by dominating people in the interior world of his mind. In that respect he is an interesting figure — but he is one not properly realised in this passable, insubstantial book.
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