Her Body Knows (review)

In this garland of two novellas, Frenzy and the title fiction, Her Body Knows, David Grossman, the distinguished, prize-winning Israeli novelist, has set himself the difficult task of rendering inner speech. The novellas, like everyday life, are full of talk, but here focused on the speech habits of the protagonists. These monologues are in the apparent tradition of Beckett and Faulkner: they start out as realistic conversations but change our fictional expectations as they turn into fantastic voyages. We enter into the unconscious life of the speakers.

While these novellas sketch the audience to whom their main characters ostensibly address their remarks, what we the readers soon discover, however, is that these fictions dramatize the acts of speaking: we experience not monologues but soliloquies, overheard as they are in a play. The fictional narrative of events and actions of everyday life becomes a fateful account of the drama of self-definition.

Tell me, how is it possible, he says—the thought always strikes him in the same way, from the same exact angle and always for the first time—how is it possible to grasp that this woman, my wife, my one and only true love, has not missed a single meeting with the man for the last ten years? Except maybe once or twice a year on her sick days or when there was a family event, a war here and there, trips abroad or out of town—days when she absolutely couldn’t go out and maintain her life with him.

Musing thus aloud about the actions of his wife, the protagonist of Frenzy reveals that he is dominated by jealousy. His fantasy life obsesses him. Like Othello who, once doubting his wife’s fidelity, sees in every event and action nothing but evidence for his obsession, this novel’s main character is turned inward. He has lost his purchase on objective reality. He broods on his inner rage, confusion, ambivalence, sexual fascination. As the novella unfolds we discover he devotes his energy to stalking his wife and her supposed lover. Yet there is never any objective evidence against which to measure his obsession: we begin to wonder if this process of self-definition is actually an exercise in self-delusion.

Esti, his sister-in-law, is driving Shaul, who has broken his leg the day before and is now in a cast up to his groin, in the continuing pursuit of the lovers. But it is not clear what Shaul wants to do should he discover them. The drive from a suburb of Jerusalem south towards Beersheba, as we discover at the end of the novella, also functions as a mutual meditation between the two —or is it a form of psychoanalytic therapy with the patient lying in the back seat unable to glimpse his driver in the dark. Shaul muses:

After all, they are a normal man and woman, he snickers, and as he speaks those last words, a flame is ignited within him, and for the first time he directs its blaze at another person, and Esti feels it and rushes to protect herself from the sudden violent gust, the likes of which she has never known, as it lunges at her from the fluttering man behind her. She knows she must save herself, but does not know exactly from what, and is not even sure she really wants to be saved and banished this soon from the private master class.

The lesson in obsession will also turn out to be hers. Shaul will teach her by example what it means to brood on such matters.

The reader, identifying with Esti, who has been drawn in to the role of Shaul’s driver since her husband, his brother, is out of town, becomes complicit like her in this speaking process.

She fears that if she does not pull herself together at once, she may not have the strength later on to withstand the strange assault which now attacks...