Novel
Past Continuous
זכרון דברים
Yaakov Shabtai · 1977
Synopsis
Tel Aviv, in the 1970s. Three friends in their forties, Goldman, César and Israël, are followed for nine months from 1 April, the day Goldman's father dies. Almost nothing happens: women, friendships, abandoned projects, a little amateur philosophy, a city changing before their eyes, and with every sentence families and the past rising up. The three men judge themselves without indulgence before their elders, pioneers full of idealism, and carry a guilt and a sadness they cannot name.
Context
The book appeared in 1977 from Siman Kriah, in 282 pages without chapters or paragraph breaks, and received the Bernstein Prize in 1978. It is regarded as the first novel written in a truly spoken Hebrew. Shabtai died four years later, leaving a second novel, Sof davar, which his widow Edna and the critic Dan Miron completed from his drafts. Dalya Bilu translated it into English in 1985, Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech into French in 1993; Amos Gitai made a film of it in 1995.
Who it is for
A novel of about four hundred pages in French, without a single paragraph break. It is better to accept being carried along by a sentence that never stops than by a plot.
Prizes and reception
Chosen in 2007 by publishers and critics as the best Hebrew book written in Israel since 1948; Bernstein Prize 1978.