Be My Knife

Physical description; 307 p. ; 24 cm. Other titles; She-tehi li ha-sakin. English. Notes; Translated from the Hebrew. Summary; 'We could be like two people who inject themselves with truth serum, and at long last have to tell it - the truth I want to be able to say to myself, "I bled truth with her," yes, that's what I want. Be a knife for me, and I, I swear, will be a knife for you.' An awkward, neurotic seller of rare books writes a desperate letter to a beautiful stranger whom he sees at a class reunion. This simple, lonely attempt at seduction begins a love affair of words between Yair and Miriam, two married, middle-aged adults, dissatisfied with their lives, yearning for the connection that has always eluded them - and, eventually, reawakened to feelings that they thought had passed them by. Their correspondence unfolds into an exchange of their most naked confessions: of desire, childhood tragedies, joys, and humiliations. Through the dialogue between Yair - a family man and surprisingly successful adulterer, whose guarded letters reveal a life of duplicity - and Miriam, at first deceptively open and warm, who fills her life with distraction to avoid a past full of painful secrets, "Be My Knife" explores the nature and the limits of intimacy. Subjects; Class reunions - Fiction. Midlife crisis - Fiction. Adultery - Fiction. Modern fiction. LITERARY CRITICISM / African. Genre; Diary fiction. Epistolary fiction. Novel.