Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar Goshen: morality in question
I do love books that depict characters caught in a moral dilemma. Which is exactly what I got with Waking Lions by the Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. How could I not like a novel which begins in this dramatic fashion:
He’s thinking that the moon is the most beautiful he has ever seen when he hits the man.
The ‘he’ in this case is Doctor Eitan Green, a skilled neurosurgeon who has just finished his shift in a backwater of a city. It’s a downgrading for this doctor, the penalty he played for questioning some dubious practices by another surgeon in his previous hospital. Lose your job or leave town was the stark choice with which he was faced. So this is a man who has been hitherto an upright citizen and loving father and husband.
It all goes pear-shaped when he takes his SUV out for a fast night time drive in the desert. The man he hits looks unlikely to survive but shouldn’t Eitan call the police and report the accident? He knows he should. But he doesn’t.
It’s the turning point in his life, a decision that will set in motion blackmailing, illicit surgical operations on Eritrean refugees and a potential affair with the victim’s wife. As if this isn’t enough for Eitan to handle, he also finds he has unwittingly stepped into a crime network that deals in violent assaults, rape and murder. Eitan also has problems on the domestic front – his involvement with the Eritreans requires him to lie to his wife from whom he becomes increasingly distant.
The book begins with tremendous impact but loses some of its power when the focus moves away from the accident and its aftermath. Gundar-Goshen broadens her scope to meditate on a variety of topics, from poverty and international politics to domestic life and privilege.
Important topics but I found these digressions irritating because if felt as if the author was simply dragging out the story by throwing in as many themes as possible. Then towards the end of the novel we get taken back to more of the police thriller type story and the question of whether Eitan will be unmasked. It makes for a frustrating read because it’s clear that Gundar-Goshen is a talented writer. If only she’d restrained herself on the thematic front.
Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar Goshen: Footnotes
Waking Lions was first published in Hebrew in 2014. My edition, translated by Sondra Silverston, was published by Pushkin Press in 2016
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel. Her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, published in 2012, won the Sapir prize for debut fiction — Israel’s version of the Booker Prize and has since been translated into thirteen languages. Waking Lions, her second novel, won the 2017 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize and was included in the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2017.
It does sound as if there’s rather a lot going on here, perhaps too much for one book to contain.
exactly so, if this was a debut novel I’d say the problem was that she was throwing into it every thought that she had ever had
Oh, dear..
Ooh, I liked it. I think of it very much as a book that doesn’t care whether you like it or not, which is an unusual attitude for a writer to take given the importance of marketing to literary careers—it’s definitely something I can respect. This is my review of it: https://ellethinks.wordpress.com/2016/08/14/waking-lions-by-ayelet-gundar-goshen/
there were parts of it I did like very much, just could have done with less of the other stuff
I think books with moral dilemmas are the best kind of all… I think that’s why I like Graham Greene so much. But restraint, yes, there are too many books these days that are too long for themselves. It’s as if editors can’t say to the author, ‘yes, good stuff, use that bit and that bit in your next book not this one’….
Sounds interesting, I really must add this to my tbr. I think that Pushkin press are really producing some really useful work
Too bad. I like books w/a moral dilemma too. It’s a way of dragging you in.