Almost Dead (review)

It is hard to imagine anything more fraught than an Israeli writing about Palestinian terror attacks from the dual perspectives of the victim and the perpetrator. Every narrative choice in such a project is saturated with political significance, faces intense scrutiny, and will certainly occasion howls of anger from one political camp or another. In the case of Assaf Gavron's new novel, there will surely be sharp howls all around. Yet the literary merits of Almost Dead—its dark humor, furious pace, and sympathetic characters—humanize the conflict in a way that makes it difficult to dismiss.

The story begins in 2003, at the height of the second intifada, and Enoch—nicknamed the Croc—a 33-year-old salesman for Time's Arrow, an Israeli high-tech start-up in Tel Aviv, boards a minibus headed for work. It will blow up soon after he steps off it. In a parallel narrative, Fahmi, a young Palestinian, lies comatose in an Israeli hospital. During the course of the novel, in the span of a year, the Croc will nearly be killed in four terror attacks in which Fahmi participated in some capacity. How and why the two men's paths cross forms the novel's narrative structure—as well as the core of its philosophical musings.

Croc and Fahmi narrate alternate chapters. Croc is neurotic, irreverent without being offensive, conflicted about his relationship with his live-in girlfriend, and secular; he is a man of seemingly few strong passions apart from his work. Time's Arrow helps companies shave seconds off their customer transactions, the aggregated savings amounting to hefty profits. Indeed, Croc lives by Time's Arrow principles, striving for the greatest time efficiency possible. Why all this anxiety to cram as much life into as little time as possible? On the one hand, Croc's brushes with death lead him to question the heedless purposelessness of fast-paced secular Israeli life. On the other hand, after each terrorist attack the Croc realizes how a slightly different concatenation of space and time would have resulted in his death. Moreover, given the ever-present threat of death, grabbing for all the gusto you can is not necessarily irrational.

Croc expresses his perspective in a prose that reflects his personality: staccato, seemingly unable to focus on one thing for any length of time, and above all sardonic. Croc's black humor is on full display after escaping death in the first attack: "According to Ynet there were ten Israelis killed and one suicide bomber. The result: 10-1. The Jews lose again, or at any rate it's a scoreline that's going to need quite a bit of positive gloss."

Fahmi's narration shifts between the present, in which he is imprisoned in his body in an Israeli hospital, unable to move or speak yet capable of hearing and thinking, and the past, in which he explains how he arrived at being a terrorist. The tone is solemn, as befits a young man who has appointed himself the bloody redeemer of his people. The story is unsurprising: his grandfather fought the Jews, the family was dispossessed in 1948 and moved to a refugee camp, and his older brother, Bilahl, who became radicalized in an Israeli prison, recruited Fahmi after their mother died because an inscrutable military edict prevented her from traveling to receive timely medical care.

Yet he is also deeply conflicted. Fahmi loves his father but is angry that he is more interested in his children's education and safety than politics or resistance, has a tender regard for his younger sister, Lulu, respects but is not wholly subservient to Bilahl, and is in love with a young woman, Rana. And, like most of his generation, he is fascinated by the pop culture pumped into the narrow confines of his West Bank life by the ever-present mass media.

Some may argue that the narrative of Fahmi's life and his journey toward terrorism are too...