The collection of stories "Happiness Behind the Trees" is Ronit Matlon's third book to be published since her death in 2017, after the collection of essays "Ad Argiea" (2018) and the novella "Snow" (2020). This time it's not about hoarded materials: the book gathers stories, all of which were already published in newspapers and magazines and some of which were also incorporated into the novels she wrote, as well as a short essay she wrote as a 14-year-old girl. It opens with her first story published in the literary supplement of the "Davar" newspaper, and continues in chronological order through a series of stories and journalistic columns, the highlight of which is the novella "Happiness Behind the Trees", which was published at the time in a special supplement of the "Haaretz" newspaper and was partly incorporated into the novel "Sara, Sara".
The rate of publication that is evident with this book - the third in the five years that have passed since Matalon's death, much more frequent than the rate at which she published while she was alive - raises a question about the prevailing practice in recent years of publishing posthumous books by canonical authors, which usually contain texts that the authors themselves avoided publishing during their lifetime, And if they were published - they were prevented from entering the book.
This is a particularly relevant question in the current literary market conditions, where a book by a canonical author, living or dead, with new or old works, is much less dangerous for book publishers than standing behind a new and unknown author - one of many in the market, where breaking through the barrier of anonymity is a task almost impossible.
Just recently, Maya Feldman, a senior editor at Am Oved, wrote about the economic considerations behind the proliferation of classics being translated recently, which comes at the expense of translating contemporary literature that the Israeli reader is not yet familiar with (what's more, you don't have to pay royalties for old classics).
Similarly, the publication of shelved drafts or press columns of canonical writers might have been part of a healthy literary system, as long as it did not come at the expense of nurturing new writers.
The question of whether to publish books after death is particularly relevant when it comes to writers who were not Kafkaesque creatures who condemned their works to indiscriminate darkness, but rather active creators who did not hesitate to publish and for whom it can be assumed that if they refrained from publishing, it was for a good reason.
Apart from the dead artist's right that his literary legacy will not be diluted by materials that would not pass the threshold of his judgment, this also concerns the ways of dealing with the "death of the author" by those who cherish his memory.
Michal Ben-Naftali, the editor of the book, writes in the latter part that the decision to publish writings after the death of their authors is not only an act of love, longing, gratitude and the need to continue a conversation that was interrupted, but also a desire to reintroduce the dead writer's writing into the here and now, and allow Let it continue to be written - to be written in Roland Barth's sense - that is, to continue to be reshaped by the winds of time.
However, in practice, the attempt to continue the dead author into the present through a renewed and mostly forced publication of old texts, brings here an almost opposite result.
Even the strong stories in the collection, which justify a re-reading - and not all of them - mainly point to the distance between them and the contemporary literary world.
It cannot be called obsolescence, because literature has not necessarily progressed.
She has changed, and moved away from the values, the language, and the literary models from which Matlon wrote her first stories in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to the point that when we read them today it is no longer possible to read them as such, and reading them is mainly a turning of the gaze on us - how much we have changed .
The first story, "Madame Rachel", published in 1979, when Matalon was 20 years old, is an instructive example, if only because the story itself deals with the crooked ways in which memory works and with the outrageous misery that exists in the estate left by a person after his death.
The speaker observes Madame Rachel, born in Alexandria, in the last days of her life, until her death, through a veil of mist.
She sees her as a dubious character with a dark sexuality, a story about her being a prostitute in the past, and in fact sees mainly herself, her anxieties and the guilt gnawing at her, partly for sexual episodes she was involved in.
But the look at Madame Rochelle, more than it comes to reveal the looker or the looker, reveals itself, its narrative texture, which emerges from fragments, hints and half-things.
The young Matalon succeeds in establishing the conflicted inner world of the speaker through a text made almost entirely of fragments of camouflage, which requires the reader to become a much more attentive observer than the speaker and to collect with great patience all the interruptions of her observation.
If from a contemporary point of view this fragmented story is read as foreign and very hardened, it is not because the literary world is necessarily more superficial, but because the fragmented observation in the story is far from the ways of observation used today, and also from those of Matalon herself in her later stories, some of which are included in the collection.
It was not for nothing that Matlon wrote years later about her first story - even though it was written with obvious talent - that it "wasn't fit for human consumption".
However, many of the later stories in the collection, which already suffer from the narrative changes that have taken place in literature since then, are much less exciting than the first ones.
Particularly problematic in my eyes is the choice to end the file with a text written by the 14-year-old Matlon, "A secret that I kept for a long time", and which was submitted to her teacher at school.
It's not a story, and it's written by a non-writer, yet.
It's a raw text, in which Matlon says that she keeps her father's frequent disappearances a secret, and it's clear that already as a very young girl she understands that these disappearances are the biggest disappearance of her life.
It's hard not to feel uneasy at the addition of this essay to the stories of the mature writer, as a kind of psychological "evidence" that reveals too much about the writer, and illuminates the "secret" of her writing to the point of blinding.
It is particularly difficult to understand why this crude "solution" is necessary for her writing and her personality, alongside her sophisticated and nuanced act of writing as it is embodied in the first stories in the collection, as well as in her other novels (in fact, the missing father is a constant presence throughout her work, and especially in the novel "The Sound of Our Footsteps" , and in this respect there is no biographical innovation in this essay, except for its form, which is the opposite of everything she tried to achieve as a writer).
In this way, the essay is a particularly jarring closing chord to a collection born out of love and aspiration for the continuity of her work, as the editor Ben-Naftali writes, but in practice it is stamped with the noticeable absence of the author, who knew very well from her first stories to direct a glance even without "revealing her face" too much.
Ronit Matlon / Happiness behind the trees, with Oved, 204 p.
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