It seems that in the past three years, Roi Chen's work has been overflowing, and his (literary) hand is everywhere. Chen, the playwright in residence of the Gesher Theater, has staged two original plays for adults and a children's play by him since 2020. He also retranslated Chekhov's The Seagull and Winnie the Pooh, and published the excellent novel Souls, which earned him a Sapir Prize nomination. He is now publishing another novel.
Chen's literary productivity – which dominates theater, fiction and translation, which skips between adults, children and youth and juggles Hebrew, English, Russian and Italian – is very characteristic of his last two novels: "Souls" and the new "Big Noise." Both of these works are replete with characters, events and plot twists, and mostly they are full of voices and speech – great noise, usually in the best sense of the word.
Perhaps because he grew up in the theater, Roy Chen has a fondness for multiplicity of characters and the creation of polyphony in his novels. In the well-remembered "Souls," Grisha the Silent describes, in a raging and stormy monologue, five different reincarnations that he went through in different places and periods in history. To make matters worse, the entire novel is told alternately in the voices of two characters: Grisha Jr. and his mother, with whom he lives.
"Big Noise" is built in an equally creative and multi-voiced way, and consists of three complementary parts. The first presents the story of Gabriella, a gifted high school student and cello player who is on a journey across Tel Aviv following her youthful love for Jonathan Taub, the "bad boy" of the class. This part takes place during one school day, when Gabriella "breezes" out of school for the first time in her life.
The first part is structured by analogy with the lessons Gabriella misses at this hour at school, into which Chen provides us with only a partial glimpse. The parallels between Gabriella's story and the lessons in the class sometimes seem like a gimmick, and some are a bit creaky, but Chen uses his comedic and creative abilities as an author to make the most of them. For example, when Gabriella wonders to herself, while in class there is a civics class, whether she and Jonathan can be defined as a nation on the basis of their common language, culture and history; Or during an hour of music history class, when she's busy creating a well-orchestrated cacophony of shouts at Dizengoff Center.
The second part of the novel concerns Gabriella's mother, Noa, a busy career woman and a tireless talker, who receives a 40-hour silence workshop in the Jerusalem Hills as a gift from her family for her 24th birthday. The inevitable clash between Noa's verbal flow and the spiritual women in the Silence Workshop happens faster than expected, and Noa also embarks on a surreal odyssey throughout Jerusalem.
Unlike Tel Aviv, about which Chen writes reliably, and with precision that reaches the level of navigation between the stores in Dizengoff Center, Chen's Jerusalem is a little less reliable, and it is portrayed as a kind of idea of beer in the eyes of a common Tel Avivian. For example, when Noa finds herself at a party of young Jerusalemites, "nothing seems to connect them except the fact that they are all young. Much younger than Noa. Dress code - mixed Jerusalemite, Bedouin sleeve under a tailored shirt, or a long skirt and transparent tank top. She sees a soldier with a flapping disc, a guy in a lawyer's suit, someone in a dress with her edges laced on the floor, maybe a Bezalel student, two young men from East Jerusalem, a boy in a belly shirt, a girl in very short pants, all sending organs everywhere."
Chen's feverish mind also found a clever ruse by which the second part of the novel was built: the chapter titles are taken from the congratulatory messages Noa receives from her friends – "Congratulations, Queen!", "forty!!!" and so on – and the content of each chapter corresponds, usually with bitter irony, with the generic birthday greeting that heads it.
The third and best part of the novel introduces Zipporah, Noa's mother and Gabriella's grandmother, a character of the kind who usually does not support the heroines of novels. Tzipora is a Tel Avivian, reclusive, atheist, elderly, stubborn and irritable woman who is particularly fond of the word "choleras." By profession she translates books of all kinds, but her life's work was to complete the first Hebrew translation of Finnegans Wake, the enigmatic masterpiece of the Irish writer James Joyce. One reason for her general irritation is that she was not recognized for her work, since "they gave the prize to that schmuck, with his ancient Greek."
Tzipora's priceless domestic intellectual routine is disrupted time and time again by none other than God Himself, who chooses to reveal himself to her and appoint her as His prophet of destruction, just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and the crises that have occurred since then, familiar to readers, with the great noise and silence that came with them. However, Zipporah, like Jonah the prophet at the time, embarks on a journey to escape the burden of prophecy imposed upon her. I will confess that I sometimes laughed out loud when I read some of the witty dialogues between Tzipora, whose tongue is razor-sharp, and the God she does not believe in.
A bird's-eye view of the entire novel reveals that each of the three protagonists, or better to say anti-heroines, embarks on that obscure weekend in February 2020 on a journey of their own. In the external reality of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but first and foremost - at its head. That is, the grandmother, daughter and granddaughter move on a verbal journey, "big noise", which is in the unique and incredibly rich inner consciousness of each of them.
Despite the novel's formal overload and great sophistication, full of brilliance and creativity, reading it is enjoyable and sweeping - mainly thanks to Roi Chen's great power, which apparently stems from his work in the theater, to write vivid and believable characters, each with its own language and its own way of being special and captivating: tiny Gabriella in love, who with the cello always carried on her back looks from behind like a "cello with legs"; Noa, whose incessant flow of words immerses herself in turns out to be a cover for the rejections she experienced and the crisis of her 40s; And even Tzipora, the irritable and misanthropic literary woman, manages to emerge under Chen's voice in her greatness and vulnerability.
And yet, there is also a sense of missed opportunity in the work, which only skims with a very delicate brush the issues at its center: family, femininity, love and relationships, the value of literature and art, the importance of professional dreams and achievements, as well as social and global crises. In the same flippant and hasty manner, the triangular relationship between the main characters remains on a basic plane of intergenerational family tensions, and does not reach the climax it deserves. Thus, the three wonderful parts of the book find it difficult to coalesce into a single work. That is, despite the great effort made with grace, "Big Noise" leaves mostly three travel stories and three wonderful characters, but it lacks the literary greatness and masterpiece – which Chen himself has already managed to achieve in "Souls" – that turn a lot of noise and many voices into a complete work.
Big Noise / Roy Chen, Editor: Yaara Schori. Keter, 2023. 236 pp.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us