The Dead Man

Barak Lavie, an unsuccessful businessman whose marriage is falling apart, is on a flight back from London when he sees his obituary in the newspaper. He immediately suspects a trick by a rival trying to settle a score, but soon discovers that nobody recognizes him—not even his family or his dog. It is a bizarre and hair-raising situation; he even attends his own funeral, watches the burial rites and listens to the lukewarm eulogies. Now, as a live dead man, without identity, money or home, he tries to survive on the streets of Tel Aviv. But the city is also full of surprises: it has been hit by an earthquake and the results can be seen everywhere. Barak belongs nowhere—like a modern Robinson Crusoe living on the edge of society, he contemplates his old life from a new vantage point. Now he has the opportunity to live his life in the right way and to fall in love with his wife all over again. And he almost manages. This is an adventure story: sometimes exciting, sometimes sad, sometimes hilariously funny, and we read it with bated breath. But it also a philosophical novel that gives new meaning to great myths of Western civilization, from the Odyssey to Seinfeld, from Kafka to Hitchcock; a witty tale about illusions in family life, about the bourgeois lifestyle, but mainly about the meaning of life, death and the secrets that lie between them.