The Same Sea

Just finished The Same Sea by Amos Oz. This book is a delicately beautiful mix of poetry and prose. The simple version of the plot tells the story of the aftermath of the death of Nadia Danon. Her son, Rico, has left for Tibet, leaving his accountant father Albert to deal with his loneliness with the company of Rico's ex-girlfriend, his widow friend, Binnette, and the various characters who come in and out of their lives, including the author.

I first read an Amos Oz book, when I received the Tale of Love and Darkness as a gift. I remember being blown away by the power of the prose, especially in the early sections describing pre-independence Israel. However that was years ago, and I never ended up reading any more of his work, until when browsing through the fiction selection at work, I found this book. It surpassed The Tale of Love and Darkness in my mind, and is one of the best works of fiction I have read in a while.

The idea of telling a story in poems is of course not new, but Oz accomplishes it such a way that the book skips from novel to anthology and back again, but these transitions do not seem jarring, but are instead welcome. The varieties of styles and jumps in point of view highlight the book's larger theme of the impermanence of interconnectedness. He explores skillfully the complexity of the bonds we form with one another, while highlighting that in the end, we, like Nadia will die alone, and eventually all our achievements and tangible reminders will be turned to dust. Depressing, yes, but also beautiful. I have included below a few of my favorite lines.

"A Shadow"
...You too, with your traveling,
your obsession to go further and further away and hoard more
and more experiencs, are carting your own cage around with you
to the outer edge of the zoo. Everyone has their own captivity. The bars
separate everyone from everyone else. If that solitary snowman really exists,
without sex or parter, without birth or progeny or death,
roaming these mountains for a thousand years,
light and naked, how it must laugh as it moves among the cages.


"In the evening, at a quarter to eleven, Bettine phones the Narrator"
..."Do you happen to have read Troyat's
book about Chekhov? It brings me, right here in Bat Yam, a sense of fallen
leaves in the snow, a sense of vast gardens abandoned to the autumn wind. It's
all quite hopeless really, but at the same time quite diverting. It turns out that
something that never was and never will be is all that we have. We are woken
suddenly at night, every time a dog barks or a gate creaks, but the barking sub-
sides to a whimper, the gate stops creaking, and all is quiet again...



"In between"
Like a sooty engine at the end of its journey the lit half
of the earth drags wearily toward the shadow
while the dark half gropes at the first line of light.