IN CONVERSATION SOME 20 YEARS ago that master of the short story VS Pritchett remarked how little it might take to provide the germ of a story. "I see a couple in a bar or tea-shop and ask myself: 'What does she see in him?' Or he in her, of course.
That gets my imagination going." The initial impetus might not always be followed up, but on other occasions a story would develop. He was asking the question I hadn't put; where do you find your characters or the material for a story?
Answer: all around me; in life.
Amos Oz's new and delightful short novel shows the writer at work in the same way. An unnamed author is about to make a public appearance at which there will be a reading of his work, followed by questions and then a discussion. He knows what many of the questions will be. They are always the same. "Why do you write? Why do you write the way you do? Are you trying to influence your readers, and, if so, how?" It's a long list. "Do you draw your material for your stories from your imagination or directly from life? What does your ex-wife think of the female characters in your books?" Anyone who has been to an author event knows the questions, even if Scottish audiences may generally be too well-mannered or shy (unlike Israeli ones, perhaps) to put that last question so bluntly.
The author is bored. He has jumped through these hoops so often. He doesn't listen to the chairman's introduction, except when it stirs memories of a once-popular poet, now mostly forgotten and probably dead. He becomes more abstracted still when the next speaker, a critic, rises to dissect his work and explore his imagery. Instead he amuses himself with devising lives for members of the audience. "It is as though he were picking their pockets while the audience is immersed in the byways of his writing with the literary expert."
Then a young woman reads passages from his latest book. She is nervous and quite pretty, but not, he thinks, really attractive. His attention remains on the audience. That young man over there is surely a poet. He will ask the author if he would be so kind as to read some of his poems. Nobody understands him. He hopes that the author will be the one to do so.
Then there's a thickset fellow, once probably an idealistic schoolteacher, now embittered. At some point he will rise to ask, angrily, why today's Hebrew literature is so unrelieved negative. The author will have no answer for him. And so it goes on.
After the session he leaves in the company of the young woman who read from his work. She is very shy. Perhaps after all she is attractive. They stroll through the night streets, as he offers to see her home. Does he want to be asked up to her apartment? She is afraid he does, and becomes more nervous. "I can't ask you up," she says. Her cat doesn't like visitors, and besides, she has no curtains. Does this conversation, and what follows it, really take place? Or are we still in the game the author is playing in his own mind?
The same questions arise with regard to the other lives he tells us about. How much is he inventing? How much is based on knowledge? How much is factual? The reader is never sure. It all seems real enough – but that, after all, is what the author tries to persuade his readers of.
There is little plot, no plot indeed, though there are many stories, one or two complete in themselves, others waiting to be developed. The stories are out of the control of the characters who have inspired them. But is the author in control of them himself or have they taken on a life of their own?
The book is a meditation, on the art of writing, the relationship between literature and life, between life and death, and also about the nature and significance of literary fame. It offers easy reading, but invites further thought. It's a minor work perhaps, in comparison with Amos Oz's more ambitious novels, but it is still the work of a master, admirably rendered into English by Oz's regular translator, Nicholas de Lange. A book you are likely to return to.
