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| Yaakov Shabtai |
Past Continuous |
| Novel |
Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah,
1977; 1985; 1994. 282 pp.
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Past Continuous depicts the crises in the lives of three Israeli men - Goldman, Israel and Caesar - as they attempt to focus their lives and to extract some meaning from chaos. The book opens with Goldman's suicide, which triggers innumerable flashbacks to the events that led up to it. Shabtai's subtle stream of consciousness technique draws us into an endless morass of family tangles and social exhaustion - wives and ex-wives, passing mistresses and crushing marriages, desperate intrigues and disappointments, the loss of children, friends, ideals - and back again to the lives of Goldman and his father, constantly moving between the living past and the dead present, as though there were not much difference between them. At times it appears that the real protagonist of the book is the city of Tel Aviv - its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere and its history.
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About the Book
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The New Republic wrote about the English-language edition of Past Continuous: "Seldom in literature do we penetrate so far into the mysteries of family life....Shabtai's novel shows us how the sterner, cruder life of earlier times has given way to the anxious anomie of the present." Alan Lelchuk, writing in The New York Times, commented: "In the course of this impressionistic and relentless narrative...we are given a portrait of contemporary Israeli society that is, to my mind, the most prodigious (and probably realistic) yet in Hebrew fiction....[It] is a portrait with Balzacian breadth - of a family and a people in trouble, lives lived at the end of a lofty dream gone haywire, paradise exploding." And Irving Howe in The New York Review of Books stated: "I cannot recall, these past several years, having encountered a new work of fiction that has engaged me as sharply as Past Continuous, both for its brilliant, formal inventiveness and for its relentless, truth-seeking scrutiny of moral life." Author and critic Gabriel Josipovici praised Shabtai: "He is ruthless in his vision of what time does to people, how it dries up even the spontaneous, twists even the most generous, how badly we human beings cope with it." He concluded: "I urge you: go and read it."
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