Something Existential
Leah Ayalon`s stories take place in an imaginary world of fast food, billboards and obsessive love. This vision of television culture is delivered in a stunning mix of poetry and slang. In the title story, a woman wants to find in a man something she was once promised; a man wants to make a girl fall for him while he is being brutal. Both try on different faces. The results are absurd, terrible and funny. Nothing is more important than the fierce eroticism which rescues Ayalon`s characters from aimless nostalgia and emotional flatness.
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“ Ayalon’s prose resembles her poetry with its erotic power and disconcerting switches between the two extremes of language. She represents the newest Hebrew prose in the 90s.”
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“ The wonder of Ayalon`s stories is that even though hers is a borrowed world, her writing conveys genuine distress. It is postmodern because that is where she lives.”