Anyway--The Mr. and Mrs. Buce Readaloud Club has completed its perusal of TKAW. I still can't quite make up my mind about it, but in this case, that's a compliment: I suspect it is intentional that the book leaves loose ends, questions unanswered, issues unresolved--some things we'll never know. So, high marks, and I may have stuff to say about it in, oh maybe a couple of months.
But one thought. The protagonist is/was a spy. It's not a spy novel in the Eric Ambler sense of the term, but spying and the spy' s mind do factor in. The protagonist watches and listens. He takes in his surroundings as if--because--his life depends on it. And he never lies.
I have no reason to suppose that Oz was ever a spy. Or at any rate, not in the nationalist/professional sense. But for a writer, perhaps spying is a way of life. He watches and listens, he takes stuff in. And he never lies. Or at any rate, he tries not to lie, and in this case, I'd say that Amos Oz, writer and spy, has pretty well brought it off.
Next up: Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity.
Update: Okay, so I never said it was original (link):
Mr. Oz warns sternly against reading the novel as "political allegory" or "confessional," but agrees that Ravid [the protagonist of TKAW] could stand in for him. "A secret agent is a perfect metaphor for a storyteller," he said. "What he does for a living is what I do for a living: put himself under people's skins, try to be empathic, to see four or five contradictory points of view, to have more than one identity."
New York Times, February 24, 1991
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