The Remains of Love by Israeli best-selling writer Zeruya Shalev traces the lives of Hemda Horovitz, her daughter Dina and her son Avner. Hemda could never love enough Dina while she suffocated Avner with all her love. Both children suffered. Avner is trapped in a loveless marriage, but he doesn’t have the courage to change anything. Things take a new course for him, when he witnesses the loving consolations which a woman addresses to her dying husband in the hospital. Dina isn’t happy, either. She has a sixteen-year-old daughter, Nitzan, who withdraws from her ever more and her husband Gideon doesn’t understand her feeling of loss. She yearns for the love of and for a child and wants to adopt a boy from Siberia. As Hemda’s health deteriorates and death approaches, her children step out of her shadow and liberating themselves from the emotional ties at last they take life into their own hands.

It took me a while to get into the novel. Sentences are long and the fact that Zeruya Shalev uses alternating streams of consciousness is a bit confusing at first because it inevitably means that the narrative perspective constantly changes. In addition the story is multi-layered and complex, but Zeruya Shalev narrates it with much skill and without contradictions or loose ends. All in all I found it easy to follow the plot once I had got used to the style. I thoroughly enjoyed The Remains of Love by Zeruya Shalev. The book offered me a glimpse into a country outside my usual literary perception and beyond media coverage of closed borders or conflicts regarding Jewish settlements.

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