Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz
Rhyming Life and Death is set in Tel Aviv during one night in the early 1980s, and concerns a man we know only as ‘the Author’, who spins fiction from his surroundings to pass the time. The Author is a famous middle-aged novelist, who happens also to be an accountant — a contrast suggesting that his artistic life is an intensely private matter which he deliberately keeps hidden beyond a functional day-to-day persona. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, he is not looking forward to the evening ahead, since he is to deliver a talk at a nearby community centre, and expects to be assailed with the usual questions about his writing habits and what he considers to be the meaning of his work.
In a café before the event, he concocts a tragic past for the voluptuous waitress, whom he names Ricky and equips with a faithless ex-boyfriend and a life of quiet despair. Later, when he is being introduced at the community centre, he relieves the boredom by inventing names and histories for several members of the audience: ‘Arnold Bartok’, as he titles one person, is an unemployed courier who shares a bed with his incontinent mother; ‘Yuval Dahan’ is an angsty young poet manqué, desperate to gain the Author’s support; ‘Yerucham Shdemati’, the host of the event, is, the Author decides, dying from a blood disease.
So far, fact and fiction are neatly divided, but as events proceed, the lines between the two start to blur. Part of the lecture involves a reading from the Author’s work, which is given by a woman named Rochele Reznik. Despite not finding her particularly attractive, the Author flirts with her afterwards, but although Rochele is awed by him, she puts him off and goes home alone.
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