Lovers in a Dangerous Time

By KINNERET GLOBERMAN

 

TEN THOUSAND LOVERS
By Edeet Ravel
304 pages. Perennial. $12.95.

Ten Thousand Lovers is as much a political statement as it is a love story. That’s not surprising, given that novelist Edeet Ravel is a peace activist.

Her views are unmistakable in this searing story about the love between an Israeli army interrogator and a Canadian university student. Yet Ravel’s politics do not get the better of her art; her attempt to probe the complicated morass of contemporary Israel is compelling—a lament for innocence lost. Nancy Richler, writing in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, calls Ten Thousand Lovers, which was recently shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for fiction, a “brave and beautiful book” whose “etymological forays provide fascinating, insightful glimpses into the development of the Israeli psyche in the brief history of the state’s existence.” I spoke to the Israeli-born Canadian and former professor in Montreal, Canada.

 

Kinneret Globerman: How autobiographical is your story?

Edeet Ravel: Most of Lily's Jerusalem adventures are based on actual experiences I had. Ami resembles my first husband, Yaron, in some ways, though Yaron never went to the army and he was a pianist, not an interrogator. The description of the kibbutz reflects my actual kibbutz experiences, and I hear that many members of my kibbutz are quite angry at me.

KG: Was the novel your way of coming to terms with what Israel has become, i.e., her loss of innocence? Was Ami a symbol, in a way, for Israel?

ER: I think a metaphorical reading of the book is possible, though I did not consciously approach the novel as an allegory. However, the creative process takes place largely underground, in the unconscious, and once a novel I've written is finished, and I look at it as a reader rather than as a writer, I notice all sorts of interesting devices and layers.

I never have, as far as I know, any sort of self-help or therapeutic reason for writing a novel: it's a literary challenge, and the concept seems to come out of nowhere. I can't say I wrote the novel in order to come to terms with anything. But I would add that even though Israel has for me always been a real—and hence flawed—place, and not a utopian fantasy, nevertheless the idea of a loss of innocence does apply in terms of how Israel was conceptualized and what Jews inside and outside Israel tended to believe about Israel.

KG: How do you balance the role of the political and aesthetic in your work?

ER: Luckily, it was not something I had to worry about as I wrote. I never in my life thought I would write a political novel! It took me entirely by surprise. This was my eighth or ninth novel, and like all the others, it was the literary project that carried weight. But this time, politics were part of the story, and they appeared because they had to appear.

KG: Do you consider yourself an Israeli writer or a Canadian writer? Or something
else?

ER: I see myself as an Israeli who ended up living in Canada by accident. [Canadian author] Audrey Thomas once said, "My branches are in Canada, but not my roots." Now that my daughter is older, I am spending more and more time in Tel Aviv, and will eventually move there permanently. Canada is a temporary shelter.

KG: Can fiction be used as a political tool, and still be fiction, or does it then lose its fictional quality in the process and become something else entirely?

ER: Some novels are didactic and that turns the readers off. No one wants to be "tricked" into reading a political tract. If someone want to write a political essay, and tries to disguise it as a novel, not many readers will be attracted to that work. The wonderful thing about fiction is that it demands and sustains mystery, ambiguity, questioning, multiplicity, complexity, and a fluid approach to reality. A novel that is not didactic will present its politics in those terms. When I write political essays, I write very differently. But fiction plays a role in our lives that conventional essays cannot replace.

KG: You intersperse the story-line with mini lessons in Hebrew linguistics, deconstructing words and musing about roots. What was your reason for constructing the novel in this way, and why did you choose the words that you did?

ER: I write intuitively, and these were not deliberate decisions. I have always been interested in the complex role language plays in our lives—this is probably true for all writers.

KG: You have said that Ten Thousand Lovers is the first book of a trilogy. Where does it fit into the trilogy and will any of its characters be reprised in the subsequent two books?

ER: Lovers is the first book of a trilogy that deals with the same themes. There are some overlapping characters; each book is narrated by a woman and takes place in Tel Aviv. I am now well into the third and last book. Seer Go Flee will be published next summer with Random House in Canada and Harper Collins in the U.S. Minor characters will reappear, and major characters will be mentioned in passing. It is mostly in theme and setting that the books are related. They also move from a focus on language (first novel) to sight (second novel) to hearing (last novel).