The Crime of Writing

This is an intelligent, sensitive and tense novel about the intimate triangle of man, woman and child. It also deals with sexual identity and the relationship between life and literature. An Israeli woman, the wife of a novelist, meets an elderly Englishman by the name of George Brown while she is visitng London. After his death she receives his written confession. Her husband reads it and decides to publish it, and this text forms the inner plot. The confession opens with the so-called sin of writing, writing being always mendacious and moreover used to cover another sin: he could have saved the life of a Jewish woman and did not. But his heaviest burden stems from his relations with his father, who had brought him up devotedly. Brown, who never married or had a family of his own, persistently tries to find out the secret of his mother’s disappearance. His relationship with his father and longing for his absent mother created a tangle which is solved on the last page, when, on his father’s deathbed, the son discovers that the father was in fact his mother.