There is beautiful prose in this book, but I did not enjoy reading it. Check out my review on Goodreads.com. My picks:
When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be. (p. 134)
Look at him, she used to say to me, a man like any other, coming home laden with groceries. And yet, in his soul all the dreams, the sadness and joy, love and regret, all the bitter loss of the people he passes on the street fight for a place in his words. (p. 145)
No, what I'm speaking of now, or trying to speak of, is something else, the sense that her self-sufficiency - the proof she carried within her that she could withstand unthinkable tragedy on her own, that in fact the extreme solitude she had constructed around herself, reducing herself, folding in on herself, turning a silent scream into the weight of private work, was precisely what enabled her to withstand it - made it impossible for her to ever need me as I needed her. (p.256)
The dead take their secrets with them, or so they say. But it isn't really true, is it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host. No, I was guilty of nothing more than advancing the inevitable. (p. 258)
