Diana and David
Diana is a 43-year-old real estate agent from upscale North Tel Aviv, living a bourgeois life with David, her psychologist husband, who is a lot older than she is, and their teenaged son. One evening, David’s cell phone rings as they are eating dinner. He quickly gets up and answers the phone out of Diana’s earshot. She begins to suspect that David, although he is a good and considerate husband, is having an affair with another woman.
Under a compulsion to find out if her suspicion is unfounded paranoia or valid, Diana launches into a reckless search for the truth. She finds herself indulging in a voyeurism that produces unexpected temptations and arouses suppressed urges, with chance playing a key role. Within the maelstrom of obsession that she is caught up in, eroticism steadily wells up.
David and Diana tells an enjoyable, multi-layered and mischievous story that plunges deep into an ostensibly normal marriage in order to probe the nooks and crannies of the soul of a woman who is trying to free herself of the shackles that she has locked herself into.
Is David cheating on Diana? Who actually is betraying whom? With remarkable narrative skill, Shira Carmi probes the tension caused by the conflict between a façade of respectability and our seething inner urges. She exposes the fraught encounter between subjective perception and reality.
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“A gripping, enchanting book. The descriptions of sex are unusually authentic for an Israeli novel. The plot is unpredictable and suspenseful, and all this also has a Tsruya Shalev-like quality. Thank you for the hours of pleasure.”
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“A most enjoyable read. […] The plot veers sharply between the suspenseful and the romantic.”
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“The Elena Ferrante-like quality finds expression in the affection for authentic, surprising and bold characters and existential, fundamental truths dished up with freshness and originality.”
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“A riveting book, sensual, and as tricky as a hall of mirrors. I gulped it all down in one morning, and the questions it aroused echoed long after I finished it.”