Bliss

by רונית מטלון and Ronit Matalon

Set in Tel Aviv and Paris, a powerful story of love, friendship, regret, and war, as current as today's headlines Ronit Matalon's fiction has been praised as "haunting," "inventive," "refreshingly daring." Now in a graceful, illuminating second novel, she tells a provocative story of two loves, two partings, two worlds, two women: Ofra and Sarah.When Ofra is called from Tel Aviv to France to attend the funeral of her beloved cousin Michel, she escapes...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805066020
• ISBN13: 9780805066029
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

The art of the Novel

Ronti Matalon has written a truly insightful and deep novel with Bliss, or Sarah, Sarah, as it is called in the Hebrew original. Matalon is deeply humanistic and loving to her characters, even as she exposes their many faults and shortcomings. Matalon, as an Israel writer, also inevitably handles the divisions and stresses of Israeli society, but she never sacrifices character or plot with any agenda. So even though the book is full of tales of Gaza, the Arabs, the security situation, the novel does not suffer. Matalon stays true to the form she has artfully arranged, building the story in a series of tantalizing back stories, remembrances, and a looping around to previously told stories, adding depth and measure to the novel as she goes. As such, Bliss becomes a novel about itself while never sacrificing the nuts and bolts of good old fashioned story telling.

An Important Israeli Writer

Ronit Matalon is one of the most important young writers in Israel today. She is passionate and humane, and refuses to be sentimental or cliched. it's a shame that the only other review of this novel ignores the greatness of Matalon's humanity and doesn't bother to consider her novel's literary and political merits. 'Bliss' is not a novel that is emotionally 'easy' in any way -- it not only confronts the contradictions of political and national identity, but also the tensions of love. It does this using crystalline prose and an a-linear style that forces the reader to be actively engaged in the novel. Though her first novel, 'The One Facing Us,' is more theoretically daring, I recommend 'Bliss' to anyone who accepts that politics and love are too complex to be represented as "us" or "them," "black" or "white," "with us" or "against us."