“Don’t tell your brother” (Al tessaper Leahikha), by Meir Shalev, translated from Hebrew by Sylvie Cohen, Gallimard, “From the whole world”, 268 p., €23, digital €17.
The latest novel by the most popular Israeli writer, Meir Shalev (1948-2023), Don’t tell your brotherIt awakens a double nostalgia in its reader. A nostalgia that is, above all, at the center of the story. In fact, it presents two brothers, Boaz, the engineer who remained in Israel, and Itamar, a sports coach living in the United States, who have turned sixty years old. In 2010, during their annual meeting in Tel Aviv, they discussed a shocking episode that occurred twenty years earlier, before the era of mobile phones and the Internet. Nostalgia, then, for a time before the massacres of October 7, 2023, when the intimate and its complexities prevailed over war, just as gender conflicts still prevailed over the sound of boots.
The author had also paid the price at the time he published Don’t tell your brother in 2022. Several feminist voices later criticized Shalev’s comments during a television interview with channel 12. In this interview, the writer criticized the #metoo movement for making life difficult for “good men” and be a “combat organization” whose automatic fire hit innocent people. This leftist man was then accused of conservatism, mocked “retarded boomer” unable to understand the radical change in the rules of the game between men and women.
Stunningly beautiful
In his own way, the character of Itamar, as portrayed in the novel, embodies a way of responding to these criticisms, as he blurs the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine, while still remaining within the framework of virility. Endowed with impressive beauty, he oscillates between Don Juanism and the passivity attributed to women in seduction games. But, no matter how magnificent his physical appearance remains on the verge of old age, Itamar’s existence nevertheless reflects the reflection of a failure or a mediocre person, abandoned by Michal, the love of his life, and who was almost unable to rebuild. nothing after his death. separation. As if having in hand all the goods of a successful sentimental existence did not in any way guarantee the outcome.
Conceived as the narration, made by Itamar to Boaz, of another adventure of a traumatic encounter, the plot superimposes temporalities and perspectives with the mastery of the novelist, who was at the peak of his art. Although the protagonist recounts a trap imposed by a manipulative woman, Sharon, the brother’s interventions and biting comments in this conversation held twenty years later seem completely natural, to the point of transforming the situation into an imaginary threesome.
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