Unlike his previous book, also in his new book "Oxygen", Amir Ziv explores masculinity, this time through the connection between it and money and power • Alongside the interesting male characters, Ziv places pale women, who cause his writing to lose something of its power
The men in the family build their masculinity around the suffocating image.
From the cinematic adaptation of "The Bodenbrook House", 2008
Like Amir Ziv's first book, Four Fathers, a book that won him the Brenner Prize and entered the Sapphire Prize "short list," his second book, Oxygen, returns to wounded masculinity, flawed fatherhood.
There is no single masculinity here.
Ziv describes a diverse masculinity, which is undergoing dynamic processes of change.
The three men at the center of the book, three generations old - grandson, father and grandfather - embody the changes in the masculinity model since the generation of powerful elephants, those who like to tell how they built the country "with ten fingers" and now have difficulty finding their place under renewed norms.
So just as it is a book about masculinity, it is a book about a generational struggle, between the generation that declares "We have established a state for you here", and complains about the "young people of today" who "do not know what it is to work hard", and the younger generations who shun their predecessors. But still not quite able to put up alternative models of masculinity, and end up falling into similar trajectories;
They, too, the new men, fail to completely shake off the aggressiveness.
Unlike many other male models in Israeli literature, in "oxygen" masculinity does not rely on military initiation but on money.
The grandfather, Shlomo Yedid, started his way from a small lathe to metal processing and now he controls a huge empire that made him one of the richest in the country.
Violence is his main characteristic, and it is depicted here in exaggerated cruises: everyone experiences the resting of his arm, he crushes everyone.
His motto and that of his partner, his generation, is: "He who is polite, his place is taken; he who elbows, will never be fucked."
This is the conceptual starting point of the book, and it is the masculine type from which and against it will be derived later the more recent masculine models, of his son-in-law (his daughter's ex-husband) and of his grandson, who no longer aspire to such broad patriarchal control.
Against the grandfather's belief that "money is freedom", and that his wealth opens up a wealth of possibilities for his family members, in their eyes wealth enslaves them, binds them together and ironically blocks them from fulfilling themselves.
The three men in the family - the grandfather, the father and the grandson - build their masculinity around the recurring image of suffocation, hence the name of the book.
The feeling of suffocation activates them, gives them the power to get up and take action, to break boundaries.
They crave oxygen, which he, or longing for, fills them with the violent power that makes man a man.
It is the same suffocation that causes the father to break up his family in favor of a young lover;
Is the one who puts renewed strength in the tycoon's grandfather when he is questioned by the police;
And he makes a grandson, not yet 16, more daring in the role-playing game with the girl he is in love with.
Although unlike the father and grandfather, the boy is already less afraid of the feeling of suffocation, perhaps even looking for it, but in the end he also acts, like them, in the same forceful ways, he also craves the same "oxygen".
The role play between the boy and the girl he loves opens the book.
The two, volunteers at MDA, close in on an empty ambulance and kiss through cloth masks they wear (these are the days before the epidemic, but presumably similar scenes we will meet many more in the near future). Ziv describes these immoral relationships in beautiful and thick descriptions, but this part It is also the slowest in the book, and its placement in the opening delays the unfolding of the drama hitherto hinted at only subtle hints. Of the book begins to become clear why its protagonists were so agitated in its first
parts.Each of the episodes brings together men and women, who almost always appear here in pairs, in a structure reminiscent of a ballroom dance: men and women engage in a tense dialogue, moving in circles around themselves. as if they were chained to each other, as if they only wish to break free from each other, and building the couple also charges the desire for liberation in the context of gender is clear: these men led to things being as they are, but they are also the ones most suffocating in the end.
That's how out the feminine side perch dance This one is a bit neglected compared to men.Even in the episodes where they get
A "stage time" is almost equal to that of men, they fail to crystallize into interesting figures in themselves, and remain a container or reflection of men, who are mainly engaged in relationships with other men: through the figure of the unattainable girl we become acquainted with the hesitant sexuality of the grandson, The extroverted instincts of his father and grandfather;
Through the tycoon's hunched daughter his brightness towards her and her ex-husband is illuminated;
And through the sophisticated police investigator the contempt felt by the grandfather towards all others (and towards her) is revealed, as well as his destructive fighting spirit.
There is no fundamental problem in the fact that the characters of interest in the book are men, or that Ziv is primarily interested in the oedipal power relations between straight men, leaving women on the margins: books are not obligated to maintain principles of adequate representation.
On the contrary, the tendency in parts of Israeli literature to encompass all sectors of society often produces superficial and artificial figures.
But since the book is built on charged encounters between pairs of men and women, the pallor of the female side causes the encounters to lose some of their power.
Although his focus is on men and masculinity, Ziv's writing culminates in parts where he manages to present his tormented heroes with female figures with a presence (even someone like the researcher, who draws most of her power from the institution she represents) - and then charged encounters reveal the potential for flare-ups. That they have, and the story gets the breathing space it needs.
Oxygen / Amir Ziv, Am Oved, 254 pages