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Reader X | Israel Hayom

2023-05-24T12:49:13.018Z

Highlights: "The Scream," Maayan Eitan's second book, centers on a love story for a man. We know very little about her: she is a 33-year-old writer who spends her days in partial idleness. She is prone to depression, drinks and smokes too much, and once every few weeks she allows herself to snort heroin throughout the weekend. Her parents have passed away - it is not clear exactly when, this fact is subject to different versions. The love relationship she describes with her partner X is portrayed, in the end, more than anything, as one of suspicion.


Love between a writer and an anonymous man is at the center of Maayan Eitan's "Scream" • As in her book "Love", here too the heroine worked as an escort, and now does not shy away from lies in order to combat readers' desire to read fiction as an autobiography


"The Scream," Maayan Eitan's second book, centers on a love story for a man. A man is called X, not for nothing, since we know almost nothing about him. In fact, we know almost nothing about their love story either. Although the narrator minimizes side descriptions and psychological interpretations and tries to stick to the facts, credibility is not her guiding principle and many of the facts she provides turn out to be inaccurate in retrospect. "I've always had a certain respect for half-truths, perhaps because I myself often told lies about my life," she says in a moment of sincerity.

We know very little about her: she is a 33-year-old writer who spends her days in partial idleness. She is prone to depression, drinks and smokes too much, and once every few weeks she allows herself to snort heroin throughout the weekend. Her parents have passed away - it is not clear exactly when, this fact is subject to different versions, and the pieces of information do not work out. While her friends had long since become mothers, she was left childless – a fact mentioned in passing, but which will become significant when it turns out that she apparently has a plan for childbirth, formulated through a mask of deceptions and half-things.

Ethan's sentences are incredibly meticulous, incredibly elusive. It seems as if she is choosing the words that will erect the most perforated and dilapidated structure possible. This is not the kind of book that leaves readers at the end of reading with a clear story, or with a character that can be "taken out." It's a text prone to fading away, the most tangible presence it leaves behind is an airy trail of musicality that remains long after reading.

Suspicion, naturally, builds up slowly. It's not just our suspicion, the readers, of the narrator: the love relationship she describes with her partner X is portrayed, in the end, more than anything, as one of suspicion. She assumes X tracks her alcohol and cigarette consumption. After her depression. She hides her drug bag from him. She writes about X behind his back, without his knowledge, and when she finally becomes pregnant, she refrains from telling him about the fetus growing in her belly. "When we talk, I feel like I've been standing naked in front of him. Worse, as if his gaze could slowly peel off my skin. There's no point in lying to him," she writes, as she lies to him about the most important things in her life: drugs, writing, and the fetus in her stomach.

The narrator of "The Scream" and its author share some autobiographical details (though only partially overlapped). Among other things, like Ethan, whose previous novel, "Love" (Resling, 2020), centered on the character of an escort, the narrator of "The Scream" previously published a book about an escort that she says caused a sensation. This autobiographical closeness could have had a dangerous dimension that the narrator's array of lies protects against. As an unreliable narrator, she can afford to make statements that, had they been made by more credible characters, might have been read as particularly revealing to the author.

Thanks to her lack of credibility, she can afford, for example, to confess that her previous book, about the escort, was less fictional than she presented it. "The novel was presented as an imaginary village... Because I knew very well that the fate of a fictional text in the literary climate of the time would be better than that of an autobiography or memoir on the same subject." It doesn't matter that elsewhere in the book she announces the exact opposite – that she worked for years on the fictitious character of the heroine of her first book. Her lack of credibility gives her the freedom to occasionally release statements, true or not, that in today's literary climate are too dangerous to utter even from a fictional character.

The narrator's lack of credibility in "The Scream" can also be read as a definitive answer to the uproar surrounding "Love" at the time, when Ethan was accused of appropriating the experience of prostitution because she wrote about it without clarifying whether and to what extent she actually experienced it. Indeed, there is something obscene, and also a dimension of exploitation, in writers who write about the experiences of marginalized people who have nothing to do with them but their imagination (marginalized people whose lives, admittedly, have far more dramatic potential than their own).

But there is an absurd dimension to the fact that the claim of appropriation was also directed at writing such as Ethan's in "Love," whose grip on her character's reality materials is very tenuous, and the trauma described in it exceeded the specificity of certain circumstances, since "Love" was written with a deceptive transition between alternative facts ("The girl was six years old. That is, sixteen. Twenty-six. I mean, she wasn't a girl anymore") and between Realia and fiction (her heroine jumps from seven floors and gets up to keep walking).

"The Scream" can be read as a development and deepening of that question that began to be articulated in "Love," about how such a traumatic story can be told. But while "Love" disrupted the story openly and demonstratively, with a large, sometimes manneristic fan of literary means, in "The Scream" the doubt about the ability to grasp things is much more rooted. Although throughout the book the narrator is the same narrator, and her sentences, in isolation, sound plausible, her story, as it progresses, begins to read, absurdly, as it is utterly fictional.

In fact, this entire book can be read as a story about reading fiction—about the kind of relationship that forms between the fiction writer and her reader, Reader X. There are many clues to such a reading of the book: she says that she and X spend their evenings reading stories; that she has no real knowledge of him; That they met after he read her book. At that time, she says, she would meet with some of her readers, and with some she went to bed. "At the end of nights spent with one reader or another, I felt drained, as if I had been stripped of everyone's assets," she writes. The emptying of literary camouflage assets that characterizes her relationship with X as a reader is where the reader confuses reading the author with having sex with her. Reader X expects his author to strip his face into her autobiographical dimensions, and does not allow her to maintain the literary defenses necessary for her. She lies to him, flees to fiction. Maybe she'd lost him, that he'd be gone forever. Then she'll write a story about him behind his back.

Maayan Eitan, "The Scream", Keter, 70 pp.

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Source: israelhayom

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