“Zeruya Shalev is one of my favorite contemporary writers, her work always spiky and original, and Pain is a searing book, a wild and ravenous story of family entanglement and impossible yearning.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida and Fates and Furies A powerful, astute novel that exposes how old passions can return, testing our capacity to make choices about what is most essential in life. Ten years after she was seriously injured in a terrorist attack, the pain comes back to torment Iris. But that is not all: Eitan, the love of her youth, also comes back into her life. Though their relationship ended many years ago, she was more deeply wounded when he left her than by the suicide bomber who blew himself up next to her. Iris's marriage is stagnant. Her two children have grown up and are almost independent; she herself has become a dedicated, successful school principal. Now, after years without passion and joy, Eitan brings them back into her life. But she must concoct all sorts of lies to conceal her affair from her family, and the lies become more and more complicated. Is this an impossible predicament, or on the contrary a scintillating revelation of the many ways life's twists and turns can bring us to a place we would never have expected to be?
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Iris is haunted by a lover that left her 30 years ago, and by a suicide bombing that shattered her body 10 years ago. Physical and emotional pain are the themes throughout this novel. It starts out as the story of a rekindled love and then transforms into the study of a marriage and a family. How all lives are consequences of choices, and sometimes you can get stuck on individual choices and play endless blame games. And sometimes you put in the extra effort, to build up and mend people, even if they hurt you.
This was an easy and engrossing read. I didn't necessarily love it, but I still was hooked to find out the ending of their family story. 3.5
The scene where he learns she's a vegetarian and then forcefully inserts meat into her mouth through a kiss ... I am having been that revolted by a fictional scene in a while.
I was ready to dismiss this out of hand. Iris is encountering a relapse in pain, the result of being seriously injured in a car bomb attack nearly a decade earlier. In seeking treatment she runs into her high school love that cruelly disappeared from her life after the death of his mother. It's an emo midlife crisis with breathless admissions of rekindled love and furtive assignations. Iris' husband is distant, her daughter is away from home and her son is growing up way too quickly, nearly an adult himself. Iris toys with embracing this thwarted love that was cut too abruptly in her youth and justifies the inevitability of this.
But it's all setup for the second half when the focus widens to include quotidian aspects of marriage that extend beyond the personal. How the mundane can hardly compete with the novel and new but how it brings with it a reliability forged over time. All these facets are subtly brought to bear so that you're not reading about whether Iris will or won't blow up her marriage. That's the easy read, Zeruya Shalev is interested in what a marriage becomes over time, for better or worse.
