I can’t stop thinking about this love affair. It’s been months since I finished reading the book, but Allison and Eyal (and Timor, Aisha, Talia, and so many others) continue to occupy my thoughts, not least because the war in Gaza and the horrors that plague Palestine and Palestinians, Israeli and Israelis, remains on-going.
The Lover is a timely novel, as one which revolves around that very political and cultural conflict. But the novel offers a social perspective on how politics hits the ground, how real lives are shaped by the tragedy. The short of it, as I think most people understand, is that the situation is messy. Israelis and Palestinians, Jewish, Arab, each and every one, is woven into a fabric that cannot be unpicked, their threads too tightly interlaced for any one to be extracted without fraying, snapping, leaving a scar in the cloth. The Lover highlights that messiness, the ethical messiness, the material messiness, the psychological and emotional turmoil of Palestine and Israel.
The Lover is a love story, a romance between Allison, a half-Jewish American graduate student who has come to Israel for a semester abroad, and Eyal, a soldier in the Israeli army. To fulfill his military duty, Eyal must conduct missions in Gaza, while Allison frets and waits for his return. But there is another romance here: Allison’s as she becomes enraptured with Israel and the tensions between Jews and Arabs. This is a novel about the ethics of love, what authentic compatibility means, and the difference between passion and compassion between lovers.
What makes The Lover so compelling is that the intertwined romances here force us to confront our own biases in this or other situations. This is a story we cannot turn away from, because even as outsiders watching the news, looking in on the events in Gaza, its messiness forces us to consider what we each might do, might have to do in a similar situation.
The story, as darkly riveting as it is, is not the novels only attraction. The Lover is superbly written. This is literary fiction at its most devastating. Sacks has also clearly done an incredible amount of research, and what might be understood as ethnographic observation; the novel’s environs are so real as to transport the reader to that place, to Israel, to Gaza. The tension Sacks develops through combining research with literature results in a palpable immersion for the reader.
Moreover, Sacks’ characters are fleshy, flawed, and real. Allison is its main protagonist; it is through her voice, her thoughts, that the story is narrated (though she is not its only narrator). Readers cannot help but feel her anxiety, her excitement; as Allison falls deeper in love with Israel, readers may find they are uncomfortably immersed in Allison’s mind. This is a testament to Sacks skill with words.
The Lover is a novel I will likely return to again, perhaps more than once.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 