Pages: 320
This novel cannot be contained in a single synopsis, so it has two.
Synopsis for the Average Reader:
In this taut psychological thriller set in Israel and Europe, Ephraim wages a war without rules on the hypocrisy of the modern world. His only weapons are the Internet and his charisma, yet the body count in this personal war keeps climbing. Ephraim gets tangled up in complex, unusual relationships with four very different women. He loves, hates, sins, kills, saves, founds a secret international organization, travels, takes revenge, makes jokes, and remains unpredictable—essentially everything he can to make this book a compelling read.
Synopsis for the Advanced Reader:
While it may seem that this book was written as a reaction to the tragedy in Norway, this is not the case. In fact, the book was written and published in Russian several years before those murders shocked the world, and Ephraim’s resemblance to Anders Breivik is strictly superficial. This is a book about passion, hatred, honor, the struggle with chaos, the loner’s war against the world and against himself, the liberation of the modern consciousness from concern with taboo, “preemptive revenge,” and the obligation to be worthy of one’s calling and one’s own personal hell. In the end, it is not his relationships with women that the main character becomes entangled in, rather his relationship with humanity as a whole.
This is a book about how we walk the knife edge, struggling to maintain our equilibrium, without realizing that the only thing keeping us from falling into the bottomless void is the fact that someone bends the gravitational field on our behalf. The book is also about the sounds we hear emanating from the black void, what we hear on the other side of the blade, from life, and how these sounds get jumbled together, with the result that each of us hears something unique. And it shows that Death walks the knife edge too, stumbling from time to time and stepping on the wrong side. Death doesn’t like that any more than we do.
Truly frightening things are presented here without savor and not for their shock value. In fact, at times they are presented rather restrainedly, other times rapid-fire; the text stirs one as if with a spoon, drawing up from the depths that which was only suspected before, and then serves forth the spoon’s contents, saying: “Look, you understand and empathize. That means you are made of the same stuff as the main character. You, too, are a hero sometimes, and complete scum other times. You, too, want revenge. You, too, get tangled up in relationships with women, or men. You, too, ‘should be worthy of your own personal hell,’ which you will still have to earn.”
Why do we continue to pretend that we live in a normal world?
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This edition is designed for e-readers with black-and-white display. For e-readers with color display the 1st edition is available on Kindle eBooks
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CW1CO40
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About the authors: Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis write in Russian and live in Jerusalem.
They are not afraid to write about what they think, nor are they afraid to think about things that are unacceptable or frightening to contemplate. “We are not interested in norms or disorders. We are interested in the person who finds himself in borderline states,” say the authors. “People and societies in states of extremity—these are our favorite themes to discuss with our readers.”
