Having left Seoul with a bit of a hangover, it’s time for a change of pace on our International Booker Prize longlist travels as we head to Israel for a boisterous family celebration. Unfortunately, one of the guests isn’t quite as welcome as you’d think, but there’s a reason for that, and it lies, as you’d expect, in the past. However, the funny thing about taking trips into the past is that you don’t always end up quite where you’d expected – sometimes, you even find out that the story you were told had little to do with what actually transpired…
*****
More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman
– Jonathan Cape, translated by Jessica Cohen
What’s it all about?
Grossman, a former winner of this prize with A Horse Walks into a Bar (also translated by Cohen), is back with a moving family drama examining the perils of loving too much, and of bearing a grudge. More Than I Love My Life begins with a family reunion and then becomes a trip down memory lane as four members of a rather unusual family decide to revisit an important location from their past, attempting to find something there that will help bring them back together before it’s too late.
The story revolves around three generations of women with very different characters. The elderly Vera is the life of any party, slight in stature but large in character, a charismatic, overbearing matriarch of a veritable clan (one that actually belongs to her late second husband). If that’s not enough, she was also a resistance fighter back in her Balkan home during the second world war, as well as a political prisoner during the post-war communist era (for those interested in that sort of thing, she’s actually based on a real person, as Grossman explains in his acknowledgements).
Her daughter Nina has always, understandably, been slightly overshadowed by her mother, and the rift between them seems almost too wide to bridge. Having slept with her new step-brother, Rafael, shortly after her mother’s remarriage, she later abandons her family, disappearing overseas. When she turns up at the family party, it’s as if a ghost has walked in and soured the atmosphere.
Nobody feels that more than Gili, Nina’s daughter, a woman abandoned at a young age by her enigmatic mother. Raised by her grandmother, Gili is more hostile towards Nina than most, ignoring any attempt on her mother’s part to get closer. However, over the course of the quasi-pilgrimage the three women and Rafael make, there’s a melting of the ice, particularly when Gili realises that the stories she’s been told aren’t exactly the whole truth:
“You belong, Gili, and you have your own place, and you have people, and you have reasons and you have landscapes and colors of earth and smells and Hebrew, and you have Vera and Rafi and Esther and Chana and Shleimaleh and the whole tribe. And me?” She laughs. “I’m a leaf in the wind…”
p.174 (Jonathan Cape, 2021)
Yes, Nina is a wanderer, and soon Gili will find out just why her mother has been unable to settle down.
More Than I Love My Life is a story about love, but seen from a different angle. The question Grossman poses here is whether love can sometimes be taken to extremes, in effect damaging those who experience it, as well as those around them. The key to this is the relationship between Vera and her first husband, Milosz, who died decades before the events of the novel. While Vera’s iron will allows her to get through some incredibly damaging experiences, that same sense of defiance means she refuses to let go of her love, even when that comes at a horrific cost.
The story is told through a series of flashes back and forward, with the scene jumping from the present-day party and journey, to war-time Serbia and Croatia, as well as the Israel of the 1960s. The impetus for the journey to Vera’s homeland is Nina’s request for Rafael and Gili, the tortured life-long lover and the abandoned daughter, to do what they do best and make a film about her life, and there’s certainly something very cinematic about the way the writer artfully switches between scenes.
For me, one of the more successful aspects of the book is the way it’s narrated by Gili. What we get is the voice of a woman attempting to tell a story, but never quite managing to keep her own feelings out of the tale, with occasional flashes of anger and more than a dollop of self-deprecating humour:
If I could make a brief appearance – this is what I think – just for a moment, in her world, and show her pictures of myself today, like of me at work or me with Meir, even now, in our state, and if I could tell her: Don’t worry, kid, in the end – with a couple of shoves, a few compromises, a little humor, some constructive self-destruction – you will find your place, a place that will be only yours, and you will still even find love, because there will be someone who is looking for an ample woman with an air of the dodo about them. (p.9)
She’s an intriguing character, a strong woman whose life has been shaped by two even more formidable characters, and while she doesn’t know it yet, this journey is what she’s been waiting for all her life, the event that will help her move on.
It all moves nicely, and inevitably, towards the trip to Goli Otok, the prison island where Vera spent years for her refusal to abandon her love, with the three women (and poor, long-suffering Rafael) finally coming to terms with the past. Yes, mistakes were made, huge ones, but the three generations of women learn that even if love can tear people apart, eventually, with a lot of patience and goodwill, it can bring them back together again – and that’s a lesson worth a little arguing and discomfort…
Does it deserve to make the shortlist?
Definitely. I wasn’t a fan of the book that won Grossman his slab of crystal back in 2017, but I was sold on this one almost from the first page. It’s an intriguing story, made even better by the way the facts of the story are only released slowly, and by the wonderful voice of Gili, an unreliable narrator if ever there was one. For a book I was unsure about before starting it, More Than I Love My Life certainly impressed me, and it’s right up there as a potential winner in my book.
Will it make the shortlist?
I think there’s a pretty good chance this one will make the cut. It’s nice to have former winners in the mix, and when it comes to a head-to-head, Grossman has outdone Tokarczuk this time around. Perhaps surprisingly, given the nature of the book, it actually stands out from a group of more modern, quirkier works, and I think that will also stand it in good stead when the decision is made.
*****
Well, it’s time to shake off the rain and the effects of a rather uncomfortable night as we head off to our next destination. We’re bound for Paris now for a rather more enjoyable experience, yet there’s something very familiar about our next stop. You see, while we’re in a new place, with a new language, one thing remains the same. All over the world, it seems, the relationship between mother and daughter is a fraught one – as we’ll soon find out once more 