It is impossible to take from his illuminator what is his.
His playful Hebrew, which knows how to wear a bow tie and also knows how to release it.
The flirtatious tango dance of the dialogues, which maintain tension and sharpness.
The ease of the narrative structure, the talk on his bike: Shalev knows how to give the story its rhythm, not to compress, not to emit, not to hurry too much.
It is impossible to take the audacity from him either.
In this book he has moved away from the views of working settlement, which are familiar to him from home and are identified with him from his previous books, the hysterical bestsellers "Russian Novel", "Esau", "Dove and Boy" and more.
He now sits far above the damp ground, on the porch of an urban hotel on the beach, and follows a nocturnal conversation between two urban brothers, one from Tel Aviv and the other a resident of Charlottesville, Virginia.
And the audacity can not be taken away from him - also because the two brothers, over 60, talk to each other about one of the most difficult topics for writers to write about without shame: sex and power relations between men and women.
And so it turns out that with all his talent, this book betrays Shalev's limitations.
It is his skillful, humorous and eloquent narrative writing that stands in the way.
The strange and disturbing story that the protagonist tells his brother, about a delightful-nightmarish sexual encounter that took place between him and an anonymous woman twenty years earlier,
And it was precisely the opening figures of the narrator, the older of the two, that might have made him a fascinating figure.
This is a man like few seen in Israeli literature: a man whose main characteristic is his beauty.
His mother taught him that his beauty would "open all the doors for him, bring down all the walls of all the smells," and he learned to be on the passive side of things.
He got used to waiting for the world to open a door for him, or keep an eye on him, and he got used to being subjected to predatory looks from women and men.
"Sometimes I felt like a clerk at the base," he says.
Beauty and passivity give him a feminine dimension, and Shalev plays with this gender liminality of his protagonist, named Itamar, known here precisely by his feminine affectionate name, Ita.
Ita-Itamar, then, is a man who repeatedly finds himself on the passive side of the hunting equation, and it is not always pleasant for him.
The nocturnal flick that Ita-Itamar tells his younger brother Boaz, in their annual "men's talk," is an example of such an opposite story, in which the "female" man is the prey, and the woman is the "male," the predator.
The conversation between the siblings, which continues throughout the book, begins as a "typical male conversation," accompanied by quite a few detailed technical descriptions of the acts, alongside "naughty" descriptions of a cock with a "rabbit expression."
But very quickly it becomes a story of exploitation and manipulation: the woman exploits Ita-Itamar's weakness - he is short-sighted - and abuses him, and the disappointing reason is only revealed at the end of the book (though it can be guessed earlier as well).
The combination of Ita-Itamar's beauty and his blindness could open the door to writing about beauty itself as a kind of "disability," or at least vulnerability, or to writing about the myopia that beauty causes.
But Shalev does not develop that direction.
"Do Not Tell Your Brother" hurries to escape all of these potentials, and to "close" his plot before any of it is enough to flourish.
Even the figures, especially those of the women, remain inaccessible, as if they were a collection of archetypes, rather than a crossroads of flesh-and-blood contradictions.
For moments I hoped that the inaccessibility of the predatory anonymity would lead "Do not tell your brother" towards the dark parable, in the spirit of Agnon's "mistress and peddler", in which even a predatory woman abuses a helpless squirrel.
But here, instead of being shrouded in riddle, the woman is shrouded in relentless talkativeness that empties her of all mystery.
For example, she does not stop giving ridiculous instructions to Laita-Itamar, even during the sexual act: "I ask that first I and then you, and after all we fall asleep connected, and I want us to set some rules and regulations already now," and further: "I want to have a fuck Accurate and pleasant. "
One can read in the book an attempt to formulate some topical-historical statement regarding the question of whether such aggressive courtship or such exploitative sexual behavior is still legitimate today.
This may mean the date of the meeting between the brothers in 2010, sometime before the MeToo strike, and the date of the fling they are talking about in 1990, twenty years earlier.
Throughout the book, there are comparisons between Ita-Itamar's situation as a beautiful man and a predatory woman, and the situation of a woman in front of a predatory man: what would a man do in place of the anonymous person who starts with Ita-Itamar at the bar and takes him home?
How long would he wait before sending his hand to the demon?
But while "Do Not Tell Your Brother" obscures gender differences in the character of Ita-Itamar, the book also contains countless generalizations about the differences between women and men, in the style of "We girls look at the ass", or "This is the biggest difference between men and women ... Men continue to play with toys all their lives. "
Shalev does not deal with the gap between the gender stigmas he puts in the mouths of the characters, and the gender limelight of Ita-Itamar, just as he does not want to deal head-on with questions about MeToo's gender bias (are men less sexually abused, or are they just less complaining than women?), And on the boundary line - deceptive or not - between courtship and harassment and exploitation.
"Do Not Tell Your Brother" is flooded with quite a few explosives, but instead of dismantling them - or blowing them up - he hides them in a weak plot;
This makes it an unsatisfactory book, but also a book that leaves us with a trail of explosive thoughts.
Meir Shalev / Do not tell your brother, with an employee, 263 pages
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