Dress of Fire (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

A Jerusalem student hired to read aloud to an enigmatic woman who is losing her eyesight, and a woman who moves into a nursing home with her mother suffering from dementia: across two stirring novellas, Michal Ben-Naftali explores love and devotion between women, touching the darkness and oblivion of loss.

In “Dress of Fire,” set in the 1980s, a Jerusalem student struggling through an unconventional dissertation about the persecution of witchcraft falls under the spell of Liora, an aging woman losing her eyesight. As their connection grows intimate, the two fall into a dance of murky boundaries and spiraling thoughts, upending their lives as they look into the abyss that stretches between themselves and the rest of the world. Meanwhile, in “Margins of the Book,” a woman descends into oblivion as she processes the mental decline of her elderly mother, together secluded in a nursing home. Across a lonely plot of lost memories, mother and daughter seem to merge into one being; the dementia-clouded mind may yet relieve a lifetime of futile struggle for connection and meaning.

Sharing a moving expanse of emotions and the soulful depths of thought, Ben-Naftali’s novellas are stories of transformation: from the suffocation of ordinary life to the hidden realm of someone else; from an alienating social world to a mutual understanding forged through the coalescence of two women’s marginalized inner worlds.