LOVE ON THE SHORE
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Michal Govrin
Fiction, 2013
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During a summer in the early sixties, in a disco on the Ashkelon beach, three people fall in love. Esther, who was educated in a religious high school, defiantly sneaks into the disco dressed in a sensuous new dress. Moise has just returned from Paris to attend his mother’s funeral. And Alex, the bartender, is a new immigrant from Buenos Aires. The ensuing and love triangle is a perfectly orchestrated tempest of eros. By the end of this dazzling novel the reader understands that the historical events of the century, which has given rise to refugees but also to their will to survive, links the three lovers more intimately than their summer romance.
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Rights Sold:
France, Sabine Wespieser Editeurs; Israel, Hakibbutz HaMe'uhad
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Reviews:
“Impeccable playwright that she is, Michal Govrin has created an inevitable love storm. Each character is a prisoner of his or her personal history, and they will experience their momentous encounters with each other as shocks that cause emotional upheavals.” – Le Figaro
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“The protagonists…hold on to their virginity as much as they would like to rid themselves of it. The shore as an essence can be a beautiful metaphor for this, between the possibilities – the sea's boldness and the security of home. Govrin chooses to specifically mark the areas of beauty and innocence… [She] insists on the fairy tale, as if willing to pay the price – blindness. This is an interesting act, whole in its way and true to itself, the results of which raise questions from the moment it bursts forth out into contemporary space.” – Einat Yakir, Ha'aretz
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“Masterful, fantastic, beautiful, superb, poetic …. Upon reading this novel, you discover the poetry of life and writing and without noticing you will probably change, just a little, at the core of your heart….” –Les Livres Fantastique de Pauline
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“The young vamp balances her heart between her suitors; bodies brush against each other; hesitate… A tale of the sixties, troubling and disconcerting.” – Le Monde des Livres
“The author draws her characters in Love on the Shore with delicacy and tenderness … Biblical citations are joined by the evanescent lyrics of fashionable musical hits that release a captivating poetry. A well-constructed and well-written book. Superb!” – Hebdo des Notes Bibliographiques
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“Under the apparent lightness of a love triangle set in the sixties, Michal Govrin masterfully directs a choral novel whose protagonists, animated by a dazzling desire to live, share a luminous summer in a small coastal town in southern Israel. Michal Govrin, a perfect playwright, conveys an inevitable love storm. Exploring their love triangle, the novelist delves into the past of each of her characters and suggests to the reader, well before a dazzling finale, that the history of the century binds much more intimately than their summer romance.” – Le Choix des Libraires
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“Foundations are always at the heart of Michal Govrin's work regardless if they are the foundations of a nation or of individuals, prisoners of their own emotions. … At times the force of love has the capacity to demolish those foundations.…” – Marianne
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“This multilayered novel succeeds in being simultaneously both profound and light as air.” – Sefarad.org
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“The otherness and fictionality of Ashkelon, with its archeological sites, new neighborhoods and Gaza in the horizon beyond the border, present a parallel plot of fatal meaning. This is the place where all immigrants and remnants of the Jewish diaspora came to from each and every place they wandered. To the shore they come and ascend, as on an illuminated stage, which Michal Govrin builds with the skill of a powerful director. Here, on the shore, in this entirely human place, Govrin compresses the reborn will to live, with its full and fierce vitality, and explores survival and refuge ……. The weaving together of the story creates the novel's "shore," full, as in all of Govrin’s books, of infinite echoes and traces.” – Shva Salhoov Tolaat Sefarim Book Store, Book Launch, September 1, 2013
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