NOT ME

​

Zeruya Shalev

Keter, 1993

​

NOT ME, one of the most daring novels in the canon of Israeli literature, tells the story of a young, rebellious woman who has lost her hold on reality and now must make order of her life.

​

In a wild, fierce monologue — a confessional performance that reads like stand-up tragedy — she moves between fury and longing, fear and regret, telling conflicting versions of her life, each more absurd and grotesque than the next. Zeruya Shalev’s first novel deals daringly with marriage, family, sex, and motherhood. It is an earthquake of a novel.

When this provocative novel was published in 1993, it garnered a huge reaction from the public, generating a backlash of anger and misunderstanding, but eventually becoming a cult classic. Now, thirty years later, it is being published in a new edition. NOT ME was ahead of its time, and now it has arrived.

​

​

Rights Sold:

Germany: Berlin Verlag; France: Gallimard; Italy: Feltrinelli; Romania: Humanitas Fiction

​

Reviews:

"An intoxicating novel. This is a bizarre, ornery but above all a damn funny book. It is a psychedelic intoxication of love, a chaos of emotions from which an age-old order emerges."

—Die Zeit

​

"Not Me is a temporarily overlooked, wild early work by the acclaimed author Zeruya Shalev, and it is perhaps her best novel. The book is a kind of punk rock version of LOVE LIFE, by a rebellious artist who was obviously intoxicated by the elegiac pain of Virginia Woolf and the expressionist exuberance of Arthur Rimbaud. The gruff, sometimes cruel narrative attacks make the text a precise, linguistically virtuoso description of the symptoms of a woman in crisis." —Der Spiegel