Overview

Between Life and Death is a startlingly brave, funny, poetic, and moving autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life.  In Between Life and Death, famed Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk describes the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. Told in an arresting, dreamlike style that blends playfulness with fearless honesty, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness and understand what led him to fight for his life with such tenacity. Shifting between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony, Kaniuk inquires into the place of death in society, the lust for life, and the force of human relationships. He also writes movingly about the Holocaust survivors of his childhood neighborhood, and the battles of the 1948 War of Independence, in which he fought.  Full of renewed vitality at the age of seventy-four, Kaniuk announced his rebirth in Between Life and Death, and left us a treasure of world literature that is sure to become a classic. 'The final literary testament of one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World'  – New York Times

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9781632060921

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Reviews

How can one even review the final work of a writer as rewarding, innovative and rebellious as Kaniuk? For Between Life and Death is more than just another excellent book. Its appearance is an unusual, extraordinary and rare event for the readers of one of the greatest authors writing in Hebrew today. To me, Kaniuk s achievement is inconceivable and awe-inspiring: at the age of 77, with a broken body, after his soul almost parted from this life, he managed to pull himself together for a short while, get back to his writing desk and recount his near-death experience The book is very easy to read, the writing is skilful and you cannot stop turning the pages an amazing appetite for life, fabulous untamed humor, and no sacred cows. Sami Duanias, Time Out

This book is a portrayal of the body's deterioration, of death, but also of great beauty, great laughter; a portrayal of life and vigor, of the paradox of a man who sees life as it is and yet insists on staying alive . . .Its beauty, which is very typical of Kaniuk's style, lies in the fact that it isn't filled with tall stories death is death, pain is pain and old age is long-lasting. Winning the war is a technical matter, the war never leaves the warriors, and this is perhaps the revenge of the dead. But the rotting, as Kaniuk delivers it, is a magnificent decomposition, perhaps the greatest moment in the drama of the body. Maya Sella, Yedioth Tel Aviv

Author Information

Yoram Kaniuk (1930–2013) was born in Tel Aviv and took part in Israel's War of Independence in 1948. A painter, journalist, and theater critic, he was best known as a novelist. His 29 books include The Acrophile (1960), Himmo, King of Jerusalem (1968), Adam Resurrected (1971), Rockinghorse (1977), Confessions of a Good Arab (1984), His Daughter (1987), Commander of the Exodus (1999), The Last Jew (2006), 1948 (2010) and Between Life and Death, and have been translated into twenty languages. He won the Bialik Prize, the French Prix de Droits de l'Homme, the Israeli President's Prize, the Newman Prize and the Sapir Prize for Literature. Barbara Harshav has been translating works from French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish for over twenty years and has currently published over forty books of translation including works of poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, economics, sociology, and history. 

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