Tag Archives: amos oz

At Slate Judith Shulevitz reviews Amos Oz’s Rhyming Life and Death.

There are a lot of ways this book might have turned out. It could have been a rueful, self-congratulatory look back over a career—a Stardust Memories in novelistic form. It could have been a knit-browed investigation into the ethics of fiction. Instead, and luckily for us, Oz has boiled it down to a juicily sadistic fable of creation. Grim as the Author’s world is, it is also a demonically joyous production. He takes great pleasure in fashioning his characters, but he takes as much pleasure, or more, in wounding them. That is how he brings them to life.