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Fima

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Fima

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Overview

Fima’s life in Jerusalem always manages to become enmeshed in the mundane. With wit and storytelling mastery, Oz portrays a man - and a generation - that has dreams but does nothing. Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

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ISBN-13:	9780547630595
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	03/19/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	338
File size:	954 KB

About the Author

AMOS OZ was born in Jerusalem in 1939. He is the author of fourteen novels and collections of short fiction as well as numerous works of nonfiction. His acclaimed memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness was an international bestseller and recipient of the prestigious Goethe Prize, as well as the National Jewish Book Award. Scenes from Village Life, a New York Times Notable Book, was awarded the Prix Méditerranée Étranger in 2010. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Date of Birth:

May 4, 1939

Date of Death:

December 28, 2018

Place of Birth:

Jerusalem

Place of Death:

Tel Aviv, Israel

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Editorial Reviews

Oz, a prolific and popular Israeli writer, has dreamed up an amusing antihero for his latest novel. Fima is 54, out of shape, obsessed with politics, incorrigibly lazy and ineffectual, absentminded, charming, and compassionate. Pampered in his youth by his debonair and successful father, Fima seemed destined for a life of artistic and literary achievements but instead became a buffoon. During the course of this endearing yet maddening tale, we learn all the silly but touching details of Fima's wrongheaded love affairs and marvel at his carelessness in letting his marriage disintegrate. Fima's desire for women is all tangled up with an odd sense of generosity and empathy acquired partly through his experiences as a receptionist in a gynecologist's office. By turns profound and laughable, Fima is either bumbling around Jerusalem in his smelly clothes boring everyone to death with his views on the conflict in the Occupied Territories or lolling about in his grungy newspaper-littered apartment pondering the enigmas of sexual relationships. Although this all gets a bit tiresome, Oz does toss off some remarkably shrewd and witty observations about love, faith, and morality.

Donna Seaman

A slyly satiric walking tour through the closing years of Israel's first half-century—as refracted through the mind of an ineffectual, quirky dreamer constitutionally beset by the most mundane details of his daily routine. Efraim Nisan is a middle-aged functionary who nightly records the jarring, revelatory dreams that alternate with a waking life scarcely less dreamlike in its episodic inconclusiveness. Fima has disappointed his father Baruch Nomberg, a right-wing cosmetics manufacturer, by settling for a job as receptionist at a gynecological clinic, and disappointed his ex-wife Yael Levin, an aeronautical researcher, by letting her walk away from their marriage and into the arms of supercilious American Ted Tobias. Fima keeps disappointing himself too on a daily basis. Fascinated by charismatic Uri Gefen, he settles for sleeping with his wife, Nina, who ends each dutiful bout of lovemaking by scrubbing herself, then scrubbing the toilet and sink as well. Drawn to clinic patient Annette Tadmor, he forces himself to listen over coffee and vodka to her litany of marital complaints, only to find that he's equally chagrined whether or not they end up in bed. Fima can't even kill a cockroach without being forestalled by its reflection of the vilified Jewish people. Drifting through the streets of Jerusalem convening his own imaginary cabinet meetings to solve the nation's political and moral problems, he's most satisfied only when he's playing with Dimi Tobias, Yael's ten-year-old son. All Fima's dissatisfied longings come to a head in a magical, climactic epiphany on a Friday afternoon ramble through Jerusalem and its sequel, which shows Fima finally coming to terms with his statusas a present-day Wandering Jew. Deeply, sweetly comic in the manner of Gogol. Essayist and novelist Oz (To Know a Woman, 1991, etc.) has never focused such large matters so adroitly on such a delicate fulcrum—or created a more endearing hero.

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