Maror

Product Information

What truly sets "Maror" apart is its ability to challenge your preconceived notions and provoke thought.

Which, without being overdone, give a real sense of a world and a life that are the same in many respects as the Anglosphere. Strands include the female victims of a serial rapist/murderer, drugs and the corruption of those in power, all set against a distinctively Israeli background with National Service, war, protests and peace initiatives, assassinations and corrupt land deals. The one constant thread uniting all the many disparate threads is the unsavoury character of Cohen, and I couldn’t relate to him at all.Maror' is the story of a war for the soul of Israel - a dazzling spread of narrative gunshots across four decades and three continents. While some names were changed and dialogue is invented, most of the major players and the historical events really happened.

A murder investigation takes us into the progressive worlds of the kibbutz and the Israeli left, but the pressure to solve crime feeds a harsher realpolitik. Like the best of Ellroy, it’s kill-’em-all howl of near despair without a vision of how the world might have been better but with a sense that, somehow, we took the wrong path. Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995, gets a particularly hard time, portrayed as a more or less permanent drunk. Maror shows us the thieves, the tramps, the prostitutes, the violence, filth and corruption underlying the good behind the Zionist dream. My only real gripe is the ending, I really would've liked more although I understand why the author has chosen this route.In an MDMA trance Avi envisions a “new and different future” where he might avoid his terrible fate as one of Cohen’s bad lieutenants. This book is a delightful blend of science fiction, fantasy, and elements of the surreal, making it a must-read for those who crave originality and creativity in their literary adventures. The painstaking attention the author pays to the music of each period is also deeply impressive, as it provides a red thread of the emotional torrent in each period (from nationalistic fervour to individualistic hedonism). I almost gave up with this violent sprawling narrative set over fifty years of Israeli history, because my initial interest was vitiated by the non-stop killings, beatings and torture that pepper the first chapters.

It's a harrowing passage, another trial for the young Avi, and a harbinger of the events later that year. It might help to have a little knowledge of Israeli history as keys moments from that countries past feature centrally here, and Tidhar doesn't take the easy route of leading his reader by the hand. I wondered how much was based in truth: is the author well-informed and giving us reasonably accurate history, or is he irresponsibly misguiding readers in his overheated reach for a hard-boiled mood? I wonder what hasbarists or in any case Zionists will make of the novel, especially at at time where all anti-Zionism is being so forcibly smeared as anti-Semitism.You don't really know if Cohen is a villain or a saint, and in some ways he represents the id of the Israeli nation (perhaps?

Ellroy’s fundamental insight into American culture – and I respect it as at the heart of one of the major oeuvres of contemporary American literature – is that our ‘American dream’ is built on a foundation of lies, deceit, and cruelty that we have papered over with happy stories.Maror is the story of a war for a country’s soul – a dazzling spread of narrative gunshots across four decades and three continents. Whilst I think narratively that the serial killer plot is wrapped up a bit early and the actual ending isn't quite as punchy as I expected it to be, there is no denying that this is pretty brilliant stuff.