I think you will enjoy reading Israeli novels. The Lover by By A. B. Yehoshua is a good example.
A. B. Yehoshua is one of Israel’s top writers of fiction. For many he is somewhere among the top three. The Lover is his first novel originally published in Hebrew in 1977. It made such an enormous impact that it propelled Yehoshua into prominence where he remained at the top since his first published work.
The story is highly unusual. It is very well written. We learn much about the characters, their needs, desires, thoughts. But the actions of some, especially the husband and wife, and the man from France are bizarre. Their marriage started well. They loved each other in a conventional manner despite the wife being far more intellectual. She became a teacher, while he worked in a car garage. Soon he owned the garage, had several dozen workers, all Arabs, and became rich. They had a son who was deaf, but his deafness may have made them love him more. The husband made him a hearing aid which he could turn off at will.
One day the five-year-old turned off his hearing aid. When he crossed a street, he did not hear an approaching car, and was killed. Life changed at home after his death. There was no more sex. It was then that the story rises to the bizarre. The husband meets a man who returns from France because he hears that his grandmother is dying. She has been in a coma in a nursing home for about a year. The husband and man from France meet when the man comes to have his 1947 Morris car repaired at the garage and is unable to pay his bill. The husband brings him home. He has a plan which is highly unusual, highly.
It is 1973 and war breaks out. Many people are called up to serve in the Israeli army. Egypt has attacked. Up until then, the man from France was at the husband and wife’s house almost every day, helping the wife in her school work. But then he disappears. It was then that the story becomes rises higher in the hazy atmosphere of the bizarre. The husband spends almost all of his time looking for his wife’s lover and his 1947 Morris. Although he had long since stopped working he buys a tow truck so that he can drive the highways every night to tow cars which were in accidents so that while driving he can seek the 1947 Morris.
The story is written from the perspective of the wife, the husband, their daughter, the grandmother who came back to life, and an Arab boy who the husband brought to work in the garage and then used in his towing activities. Short pieces of at most several pages long are devoted to each from time to time. We read the reactions of each of them to what is happening. We read about how each person frequently misunderstands what the other is thinking or doing, about the Arab boy’s love of the husband and wife’s daughter and her feelings about him, the thoughts of the very old grandmother, for she is quite bright, and her feelings about the Arab boy who was brought by the husband to live with her, how she loves the boy, wants him to stay with her, yet fears him because he is an Arab, and the dreams each had. And we read about the feelings of Arabs and Israelis generally about each other. It is no surprise that the Israeli population was thrilled when A. B. Yehoshua published his first book.
