Translated by Jessica Cohen
Picador, 2006
Reviewed by Pedro Ponce

Israeli novelist and journalist David Grossman explores family estrangement in the two novellas comprising Her Body Knows. "Frenzy" follows Shaul and his sister-in-law Esti, who is recruited to drive the injured Shaul to a mysterious meeting that involves his wife. The drive forges a strange bond between the in-laws as Shaul reveals his suspicion that Elisheva is cheating on him. The closer they get to their destination, the more Esti questions her dismissive opinion of Shaul, and her satisfaction with the domestic order she strives so hard to maintain within her own family. Grossman is a commanding writer of fictional consciousness; applied in the condensed novella form, it produces characters of striking richness and intensity. Much of the drama of "Frenzy" stems from Shaul imagining Elisheva and her lover together in scenes that play out with particular vividness:

It was difficult for him to explain this even to himself, but he vaguely
sensed that if she and the man were capable of being in a state of utter calm, without passionately throwing themselves at each other, this must mean that he, Shaul, had lost her.

In "Her Body Knows," Rotem, a novelist, faces possibly the toughest audience of her career. Her dying mother, Nili, wants to hear Rotem's story based on an episode from Nili's free-spirited past as a yoga instructor. What mother remembers fondly, daughter recalls bitterly as a time of parental neglect. Nevertheless, Nili wants the whole story:

She looks at me and I at her, and suddenly, in silence, and with no
demarcation of time, as if eighteen years have not gone by, the fat and troubled girl I was comes home and finds her sitting in the kitchen with her robe half open, with eyes completely dead, saying with a stony face, "Listen, Rotem, something has happened."

"You'd better not have taken any pity on me in the story," she says immediately. "I'll know right away if you did."

Rotem's story and the actuality of her relationship with Nili are poignantly juxtaposed, belying metafiction's reputation for cold cerebral gamesmanship. Along with its companion novella, Grossman's title piece is centrally preoccupied with the power of stories to fascinate, reconcile, and exorcise.