"The central character in Waking Lions, however, is not a desperate
immigrant. Doctor Eitan Green is an experienced Israeli neurosurgeon
who lives in the city of Beersheba. After a particularly tiring shift
at Soroka hospital he climbs into his SUV and drives out to Kibbutz
Tlalim, a race track in the desert. It is out here, trying to achieve
a cathartic release by driving around at top speed, that Eitan knocks
down and kills an Eritrean man. At home, Eitan is coming to terms with
what he has done when a tall and elegant black woman called Sirkit
knocks on his door. She is the wife of the dead man, and is holding
Eitan’s wallet in her hand"
http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/books_and_poetry/14340364.Journey_to_the_heart_of_an_accidental_killer__review_of_Waking_Lions_by_Ayelet_Gundar_Goshen/?ref=rss
Journey to the heart of an accidental killer: review of Waking Lions
by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Nick Major / 4 hours ago / Books & Poetry
Waking Lions
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Pushkin Press, £12.99
"The dust was everywhere. A thin white layer, like the icing on a
birthday cake no-one wants. It had accumulated on the palm tree fronds
in the central square … dust on advertising boards; dust on bus stops;
dust on the bougainvillaea straggling along the edge of the sidewalk,
faint with thirst." The beginning of Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s second
novel, Waking Lions, is a none-too-subtle allusion to the opening of
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath. Steinbeck’s struggling farming
families flee the dustbowl of Oklahoma in search of the green – if not
entirely pleasant – land of California; the Eritrean migrants in
Gundar-Goshen’s story move from dustbowl to dustbowl: from a country
of war and starvation to the lonely desert lands of Israel.
The central character in Waking Lions, however, is not a desperate
immigrant. Doctor Eitan Green is an experienced Israeli neurosurgeon
who lives in the city of Beersheba. After a particularly tiring shift
at Soroka hospital he climbs into his SUV and drives out to Kibbutz
Tlalim, a race track in the desert. It is out here, trying to achieve
a cathartic release by driving around at top speed, that Eitan knocks
down and kills an Eritrean man. At home, Eitan is coming to terms with
what he has done when a tall and elegant black woman called Sirkit
knocks on his door. She is the wife of the dead man, and is holding
Eitan’s wallet in her hand.
Sirkit, it transpires, is one of the best things about Waking Lions.
Beautiful, clever and sharp, she is a kind of down and out femme
fatale who knows that only the ruthless survive when you live in a
criminal underworld.
The price Eitan has to pay for Sirkit’s silence is to become a doctor
to the endless procession of illegal immigrants resident and passing
through Tlalim. In a garage near the track where he killed Sirkit’s
husband, Eitan is forced into running a nightly clinic. His attempts
to hide his crime and after-hours activities from his family are made
all the more problematic when his police inspector wife, Liat, is
tasked with finding out who killed Sirkit’s husband. As the narrator
remarks: "You never understand how complex reality is until you have
to find a replacement for it." The plot turns into a labyrinth that
winds through the racial and class divides in Israeli society, and
Gundar-Goshen tells this suspenseful story with a delving and fresh
style that unearths the inner lives of her characters.
For all the drama, it is in the minutiae of Gundar-Goshen’s prose that
the most pleasure is to be found. As an African immigrant, Sirkit is
invisible to all who look at her. But in the restaurant where she
illegally works, a different sort of oppression is encountered. The
clientele do see her, but only as an object: "They stared at her when
she walked and imagined her when she was gone, but at no point did
they ever see her. They merely piled their desire on her, the way jugs
of water are tied on a donkey’s back." The metaphor perfectly conjures
up the utilitarian way that Eritrean women are treated, both by
mainstream society, and by the Bedouins who exploit them and their
labour. Eitan seems to be one of the few who understands Sirkit in a
holistic way, mind and body, and soon the enmity between them turns
into something close to love.
Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, also explored the
dangers of love and how it can change a person into something they
thought they weren’t. The protagonist, Yaacov Markovitch, marries a
woman to save her from Nazi-dominated Europe, but denies her a divorce
in the hope that one day she will love him back. One Night
demonstrated a wonderful tragi-comic sensibility and a sly sense of
irony. Waking Lions leans more towards pathos, although there are
comic interludes: the minor character Victor Balulo, for example, who
seems to conduct his life in a respectable manner, then stands on
street corners and screams expletives into the dusty air. The premise
of this new novel – a privileged white male becomes enmeshed in a
world he has spent his whole life working to avoid – is less original
than Gundar-Goshen’s debut, but this is of little importance once one
has entered her imaginary world. Moreover, Waking Lions shows us that
there’s more mystery in who we think we are than in the narrative of
any crime thriller.
Received on Sat Mar 12 2016 - 23:37:17 EST