“All happy families are unhappy – each in their own way,” Yaron Ashkenazi, the protagonist-narrator of this short novel, sums up his family situation. Grossman’s trio of “rare togetherness” – father-mother-child – is perhaps the most extreme and blatant of all the trios we have known in Grossman’s literature. From childhood, Yaron was destined to be a future narrator, studying his father and mother in their unusual family, in which the father’s “murky, twisted soul” was “inextricably entangled in the mother’s bright soul.”

When Yaron was fifteen years old, his father was arrested and put on a lengthy trial, which occupies the foreground of the plot of the first part. The father is accused of a financial sting operation in which he emptied his clients of their savings. The son and mother, who are held emotionally accountable by the angry and vengeful prosecutors, appear at the court every day, and are flooded with stories and testimonies of the past – the character that the father has been hiding all these years. In front of the mother’s eyes, the “husband project” that she has worked on for twenty years of marriage, is shattered.

As the father enters a sixteen-year prison sentence, he calls out to his son, “I wasn’t there!” and denies him any contact over the years to come. But an unusual occurrence brings them together, and the son – now thirty-something – discovers facts that make his father the polar-opposite of everything he knew about him. The breathtaking transformation that takes place deepens his character but also forces us to return to the first part of the novel and completely change the understanding of the central details.

Yaron Ashkenazi writes the book in first person many years after his father’s trial and imprisonment. Sometimes he also becomes an omniscient third-person narrator, guessing facts and their inventors. But he expresses the panoramic point of view of the writing time only in brief flashes; in the mesmerizing texture of the rest of the book, he assimilates the knowledge and understanding of the child, the teenager, and the young man he becomes in real time. The characters in the book do not respond to unifying perceptions of identity. They contain fundamental contradictions and refuse to formulate a rounded and restrictive totality.

With much unraveling, they evade the words – words, where are you?

Rights Sold:

Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Germany: Hanser; Spain (Catalan): Grup 62; Spain (Spanish): Penguin Random House