{"id":128,"date":"2018-05-21T15:36:24","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T14:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/?p=128"},"modified":"2018-05-21T15:36:24","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T14:36:24","slug":"a-thriller-in-the-israeli-desert-ayelet-gundar-goshen-waking-lions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2018\/05\/21\/a-thriller-in-the-israeli-desert-ayelet-gundar-goshen-waking-lions\/","title":{"rendered":"A thriller in the Israeli desert: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston (Pushkin Press)<\/h2>\n

If ever a book has taught me not to judge it by its cover, this is the one. Not because there\u2019s anything wrong with the cover, but because I nearly skimmed past this, thinking that a male doctor suffering a crisis of conscience wasn\u2019t a great fit for this project. The blurb begins: \u2018Dr Eitan Green is a good man. He saves lives. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road in his SUV after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene\u2019. Though it sounded quite intriguing I initially passed over it, but thank goodness my curiosity couldn’t resist the intrigue indefinitely… because in Waking Lions<\/em><\/a>, a tale of secrets, lies, extortion and atonement, I found two women as captivating as they were complex, whose relationship to Dr Eitan Green has inhabited my mind for weeks and who, I suspect, will stay with me long after I might forget the protagonist himself.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Image taken from https:\/\/www.pushkinpress.com<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the women is Eitan\u2019s wife, Liat, a senior detective in the Israeli police. She is an ambitious professional, a loving mother, and has a keen sense of what is right. The other is Sirkit, a taciturn Eritrean who sweeps floors for a living, and who Eitan would not look at twice if he passed her in the street. She is the wife of the man Eitan killed: she saw what happened, and she comes to demand atonement. Suddenly Eitan\u2019s life is divided between these two women, between intimacy and veneer, between truth and lies, between Eitan Green the medical prodigy and Eitan Green the murderer. In her second novel (following her critically acclaimed debut, One Night, Markovitch<\/em>), Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen writes a perfectly flawed anti-hero and two compelling women between whom he is torn, and Sondra Silverston translates so beautifully that I forgot I was reading a translation. There was only a single sentence in over 400 pages that I could nit-pick about (but I shan\u2019t, as it would give away a twist in the tale!)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no waiting around for the intrigue to begin: the prologue opens with the line \u2018He\u2019s thinking that the moon is the most beautiful he has ever seen when he hits the man\u2019. When Eitan gets out of the car and looks at the man, he realises that the man is going to die, and that if he reports his involvement, his own life as he knows it will be over. Eitan imagines his detective wife Liat looking at him the way she looks at criminals before they confess, and then \u2018it leaped up and grasped him, all of him, the choking icy fear that screamed in his ears \u2013 get into the SUV. Now.\u2019 It\u2019s the middle of the desert, after all: no-one has seen him, no-one knew he was there. This decision sets up the uncomfortable underlying question which pervades the narrative throughout: what would you do?<\/p>\n

\u201cLiat\u2019s dogged insistence on solving the case of the desert hit-and-run brings her ever closer to a truth she resolutely refuses to see, and the urgency of the narrative as it hurtles towards its conclusion is breathtaking in its brilliance.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eitan\u2019s instinctive choice makes him enter a new life, in which by day he carries on as before, but Sirkit owns his nights. Liat presides over their beautiful household where everything has its place, and Sirkit dominates the long hours Eitan spends beside her in a makeshift hospital deep in the desert. Liat is both a strong-willed professional making her way in a man\u2019s world who \u2018would rather hate herself than be considered a prude\u2019 and a bruised woman struggling to maintain a relationship with an overbearing mother, come to terms with the death of a beloved grandmother, and raise her own children in a happy home; Sirkit is portrayed by turns as a toxic she-devil existing only to torment Eitan and an intoxicating goddess, his mirror and his obsession. Though there is much of this kind of polarity in the narrative, there is nothing two-dimensional about it: the character development is excellent, and though both women are viewed primarily through Eitan\u2019s eyes, any objectification is subtly evident in the third-person narration (\u2018Long after he left the garage, she still felt his gaze on her. Men can fasten their eyes on you the way people put a collar on a dog. They didn\u2019t have to tug it; just knowing that the collar was there was enough to make the dog behave\u2019; \u2018When he turned his glance from the fence, he saw that she had been looking at him for several moments. That made him uncomfortable. It was one thing for him to look at Sirkit without her knowing it, and something else for Sirkit to look at him\u2019). Sirkit\u2019s ultimate unknowability is where her power lies: she is an enigma that Eitan simultaneously hates and wants to penetrate. Similarly, Eitan\u2019s wife is no caricature: Liat’s \u2018exhausting composure\u2019 subdues even the most misogynist male prisoner, but she is still described as \u2018that hot little pussy from the police\u2019, and plays her part in a patriarchal hierarchy in which she allows herself to be patronised by her male colleagues and pretends to be impressed by them because \u2018what else could she do?\u2019 Like Sirkit, though, Liat has her own backstory: she was raised in relative poverty, is as proud as she is sensitive, and is characterised by a profound humanity that makes her want to believe her husband\u2019s ever-spiralling lies even as she senses that their previously stable relationship is crumbling at the foundations. This is no ordinary domestic love triangle drama though: Liat\u2019s dogged insistence on solving the case of the desert hit-and-run brings her ever closer to a truth she resolutely refuses to see, and the urgency of the narrative as it hurtles towards its conclusion is breathtaking in its brilliance.<\/p>\n

Alongside social comment on the plight of migrants and the repeated imagery of crossing a desert, Eitan\u2019s own journey unfolds: if, for Sirkit, \u2018to emigrate is to leave one place for another, with the place you\u2019ve left tied to your ankle with steel chains\u2019, then when Eitan climbed back into his SUV after hitting the man, he emigrated from his ordered life of privilege, and limped away from the accident with that night in the desert tied to his ankle with steel chains. There is no moralising: right and wrong are blurred, and we are reminded that there are times when \u2018being human was a privilege\u2019. This is an ambitious novel which gives pause for thought in several ways: as a reflection on racism and otherness, poverty and privilege, intimacy and misogyny, corruption and survival, and on the way life can change in an instant. The side-stories are all connected, and if they come together a little too neatly, I can entirely forgive this in the name of a good story. Ruth Gilligan has a offered more reserved appreciation<\/a> for this novel, pointing to a \u2018problematic tone\u2019 in places and some \u2018awkward similes\u2019, but I didn\u2019t pick up on these while reading. If they were there, they must have gone unnoticed because I enjoyed the story so much. The descriptions are vivid and immersing; in some ways, reading this novel felt comparable to watching a film. It\u2019s a powerful, suspenseful, electrifying read, an escapist joy and the literary equivalent of its own central plotline: a jolt that will shake you out of any inertia, sweep you along into a world you had never imagined, and stay with you long after it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston (Pushkin Press) If ever a book has taught me not to judge it by its cover, this is the one. Not because there\u2019s anything wrong with the cover, but because I nearly skimmed past this, thinking that a male doctor suffering a crisis of conscience wasn\u2019t a great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[127,765,857,1037,1055],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA thriller in the Israeli desert: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions - Translating Women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2018\/05\/21\/a-thriller-in-the-israeli-desert-ayelet-gundar-goshen-waking-lions\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A thriller in the Israeli desert: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions - Translating Women\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston (Pushkin Press) If ever a book has taught me not to judge it by its cover, this is the one. 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