The Same Sea by Amos Oz

I had never read the Israeli novelist Amos Oz before, but I picked this up because I had heard Alan Cheuse say it was the best novel he had read in recent years. That was too much to live up to, as I should have known, but I did find this short novel intriguing and lyrical.

The book is written partly in prose and partly in verse, though the distinction is sometimes mostly typographical. The plot concerns an aging accountant, his adventurous son, who is traveling among the Himalayas, his son’s young and restless girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend) and the accountant’s female friend, who is not quite a lover but a little too close to be just a friend. Points of view change, postcards arrive from the Himalayas, and various characters (not always obvious which ones) ruminate on life, mortality, and the sunlight on the sea.

This is a passage I liked:

Scorched earth

The teeth of time, smoke without fire. On the back of my hand
I see the brown mark that once used to be, at the very same spot,
on my father’s gnarled hand. And so my father is back
from underground. For years he has failed and now, at last,
remembered to hand over to his son a patch of pigment
from his estate. The teeth of time. Scorch-mark without fire.
Ancestral seal. The gift of the dead
on the back of your hand.