Fima

by Amos Oz

Book Overview

"Astonishing . . . galvanic and intoxicating." --The New Yorker Fima lives in Jerusalem, but feels he ought to be somewhere else. In his life he has had secret love affairs, good ideas, and written a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151898510
• ISBN13: 9780151898510
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Luftmensch in Israel

In Fima, Amoz Oz plays with an age old theme in Jewish literature: the over-intellectual ne'er-do-well who cannot quite get his life on track. In Yiddish, this person is known as a luftmensch (literally an air person): someone with big schemes and little ability to put them into practice. Add to this Efraim's (the Fima of the English title) physical dishevelment, his vacillation between gross worship and misogynistic attitudes toward women, and the picture is comedy without dipping into stereotype. Fima keeps his humanity in the novel, despite Oz's obvious play with a well-known Jewish stock character. Also in Fima one can sense Oz trying to come to terms with women: with the problem of women in male literature and with his own writing about them. Oz has seldom written well-rounded female character, and in Fima there is a tacit acknowledgement of this. The novel's title is a man's name, but really the book is about, in great part, an exploration of male attitudes toward women.

food for thought and another great book about Israel

There are many people who suggest that Amos Oz is actually a political activist, not a writer. In fact, I think he is both. He has very clear political views (and, incidentally, I completely agree with him and admire him for them) and is a very skilled writer, who has good ideas for fiction books and is able to lay them out in very transparent prose, which makes the result infallibly a pleasure to read. And not only a pleasure, but a food for thought. "Fima" is a book where at least two planes are immediately discernible. They are in agreement with the "double identity" of the author - one is a great critical view of Israel's political situation, with an acute analysis of nearly every fraction and orientation, the media, the traditions, the language; the second one is a great portrait of the main character, Efraim (Fima) Nisan who expresses all the layers of the first plane. Probably one of the greater protagonists in the contemporary literature, Fima has a complex personality, which makes him rather difficult to deal with. Difficult for his friends and family as well as for the reader - he is not easy to classify in any way, he is neither a hero nor a villain... If anything, he might be called an anti-hero of our times. A middle-aged man, Fima lives alone in an apartment in Jerusalem. He is divorced, practically lives off his father, who owns a successful cosmetics factory and at every visit slips some money into Fima's pocket. Although he missed nothing in life, being from a well- off family and having received a solid education in humanities, Fima cannot be called successful himself. At least not in the American sense of the word. I cannot blame the American readers who wrote the reviews below for perceiving him as a loser - by their standards he is one. He works at the reception desk in the gynecological clinic. Sometimes he does not show up to work at all. From time to time he writes an article to a magazine, mostly expressing his political views, proof- reads the scientific papers of his friends - professors, and helps the nurse at the clinic with more difficult crossword clues. Intelectually, he is missing nothing. Still, he is absolutely lost in his relations with people, in the daily life, a mess of animated and unanimated surroundings, he takes things as they come but does nothing with them. He ponders on every detail, every smallest event cause him to stop on his way or change completely the course of his day. Everything can be a beginning of a small philosophical treatise. Oz puts in Fima's mouth the criticism of Israeli political course, the never ending war with the Arabs, which are probably his own views, but being uttered by Fima, an absolutely passive being, who does absolutely nothing to change anything (in fact, he is an emotional parasite), they become a criticism of the Israeli left as well. In fact, I know a lot of people who opposed the system in exactly the same way as Fima does, by passive resistance and this helped t

Fima, a symbol of unfulfilled promise in the state of Israel

Amos Oz's "Fima" as translated by Nicholas de Lange is the story of Efraim Nison, son of a cosmetics manufacturing industrialist, and an intellectual and poet whose life never quite gets off the ground. He spends half his time working as a lowly receptionist in a clinic and the other half struggling to stay in one piece, if not boring his friends to death pontificating about the dismal state of politics prevailing in the modern state of Israel. He engages his family and friends but is succoured by them. His relationships with various women including his ex-wife are also frankly ludicrous. But Efraim's incoherent and wasted life cannot be interpreted as anything other than Oz's metaphor for the moribund state of Israel's moral authority after securing its own nationhood. He questions the hardline Jewish approach to its Arab neighbours today by drawing parallels with the mentality of the Nazis in the 30s and 40s. The lurking blood hound in man is humourously but no less chillingly portrayed in the episode with the cockroach. Dimi's shattering confession to Efraim about the dog is equally poignant. Oz, though cynical about the lasting effects of positive action on future generations, ends on a quietly optimistic note. "Fima" isn't exactly an easy book to digest. The symbolism is a little heavyhanded in parts, but the undeniable sense of humour in Oz's writing carries the book. Oz is in fine form for most of the way but gets distracted and loses focus towards the last third. Still, "Fima" makes an intellectually stimulating read and is definitely worth checking out.

Funny, Moving, and Memorable

Fima was my introduction to the writings of Amos Oz. This wonderful translation retains the humor and poetry of his book, allowing the reader to step into his world, his Israel. If you like the writings of Milan Kundera, you will like the writings of Amos Oz, and Fima is a wonderful starting point.

Prophet Fima and the end of Israel's Left

Fima the clown, father of no one but an abortion, finds himself fathering(grandfathering) a sickly albino child with coke bottle glasses and capable of only a botched sacrifice, is forced to ponder- is this child the new Israel, the Israel of the Left? The Israel fathered by American and European intellectualism? This child that is not Israel's child, is this all that is set to inherit the success of the fathers who scrambled and built the nation? Fima who is so close in age to Israel itself is paralyzed and inept, and worst of all aware of it. Perhaps most interesting of the subjects addressed in the novel is that of abortion. Although there is an attempt to portray with some realism the subject and emotion of abortion, it is the symbolism of the defeated Israel, the Israel that might have been, that is carried most successfully in the material. Not that this weakens the novel, it just carries the reader away from the personal and to the national. Published in 1991, Oz predicted correctly that a peace must be reached, but that it would have to be the butchers and the gangsters who broker it.