More Than I Love My Life

March 1, 2021

In this latest from internationally renowned Israeli novelist Grossman, 90-year-old Vera takes daughter Nina, with whom she has a tense relationship, and granddaughter Gili, who's close to Vera but distant from Nina, to a barren island off the Croatian coast. There, she explains, she spent three years imprisoned and tortured for refusing to denounce her husband.

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Starred review from May 24, 2021
Grossman’s tender and disquieting latest (after A Horse Walks into a Bar) looks at three generations of women whose bonds are fissured by histories of restlessness and war. Gili, an aspiring filmmaker, has never forgiven her mother, Nina, for leaving her and her father when Gili was a toddler. Nina was raised in Yugoslavia and hasn’t recovered from her own sense of abandonment after her mother, Vera, an anti-Nazi partisan, was held in a prison camp for refusing to renounce communism. Vera, who’s both Gili’s biological grandmother and the stepmother of Gili’s father, Rafael, is the family’s center. When Nina visits for Vera’s 90th birthday party, she asks filmmaker Rafael to make a documentary for the family about their relationship; ultimately, Gili, who once worked as Rafael’s assistant, insists on having the final edit both out of a desire for creative fulfillment and to make sure they get the project right. The four talk, film, and revisit the dilapidated island prison, and their relationships shift as they grapple with Vera’s and Nina’s past. Grossman shines a light on the victims of the violent split between Tito and Stalin, as well as on the stories people tell themselves to explain, survive, and forgive. And in Vera, who is nimble and sharp at 90, endlessly self-mythologizing, and possessed of a broken Hebrew that Cohen renders into idiosyncratic broken English, the author has created an unforgettable character. This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman’s long list.

July 1, 2021
Three generations of women confront a shared legacy of trauma. When Nina was 6 years old, her mother was imprisoned on Goli Otok, an island off the coast of what was then Yugoslavia, after refusing to denounce her husband for his allegedly Stalinist sympathies. Nina and her mother, Vera, survived the three-year ordeal, but with lingering scars. Grossman's latest novel is an account of their belated attempt to confront those scars and the extent to which they might have contributed to their own suffering. In the mid-1950s, Vera and Nina took off for Israel, where Vera remarried, becoming the matriarch of a sprawling family, and Nina launched a disparate, sexually promiscuous life. The first part of Grossman's novel, in which Vera's family holds a 90th birthday party for her and Nina's adult daughter, Gili, reflects on her own parents' relationship, is the most moving. As the novel progresses, though, it begins to feel overdetermined. The device Grossman uses to tell the story--Gili is a documentary filmmaker recording conversations about the past--isn't an entirely necessary one. In fact, all the asides about turning cameras on or off, zooming in or out, distract from the more important--and more interesting--details. Worse is the way that Grossman pushes the pathos of the story to its breaking point, and then beyond. Together with her mother, father, and grandmother, Gili visits Goli Otok, where they all confront not only the climax of their shared story, but also a literal storm that leaves them stranded overnight. Grossman, a justly celebrated Israeli novelist, could have done a lot more with a lot less. Occasionally moving but more often overwrought, Grossman's latest novel is not his finest.

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July 1, 2021
Three generations of women confront the traumatic events that shaped their lives in this powerful novel from internationally acclaimed Israeli author Grossman. Gili was raised by her father, Rafael, after her mother, Nina, abandoned her when she was just over three. Aloof and cold, Nina has grappled with her own abandonment issues all her life; her own mother, Vera, was taken to Goli Otok, a Croatian penal colony, when Nina was just six-and-a-half. When the three women are reunited to celebrate Vera's ninetieth birthday, Nina reveals a startling diagnosis and makes a powerful request. She asks Vera, Rafael, and Gili to take a trip with her to Goli Otok to film Vera's account of what happened to her during the years she was absent from Nina's life. As they journey to the island, Vera confronts her devastating time in the re-education camp and confesses a long-held secret. Nina tries to reconnect with Rafael and Gili, and Gili confronts the way her mother's abandonment has shaped her own sense of family. Grossman performs a deft exploration of how trauma impacts succeeding generations.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021

Gary Shteyngart described Grossman's 2017 novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar, as a blend of pathos and difficult hope. In many ways, that combination characterizes Grossman's entire bibliography (e.g., Falling Out of Time; To the End of the Land). Here, Grossman unspools the unintended consequences of shielding your children from family secrets and the generational scarring that remains. Nina, who's estranged from both her mother Vera and her daughter Gili, is diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. In an attempt to reconnect to her family and preserve memories for her future self, Nina suggests filming a documentary about Vera's life on her 90th birthday. With Gili directing, the three women set sail for the island of Goli Otok, a former labor camp off the coast of Croatia where decades ago Vera was imprisoned for several years, on suspicion of being a Communist sympathizer. As Vera recounts the stages of her life, her maternal decisions echo through the lived experiences of both Nina and Gili and shatter the emotional walls between the three generations of women. VERDICT A visceral dissection of what we choose to protect and neglect in striving for moral clarity.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.