The Eternal Bride

In The Eternal Bride Orpaz let himself go with a boldness and freedom surpassing his previous books. The novel centers around a metaphor of power. Grandma Levana, the demonic mother-figure, is one of the dual focuses of the book, a woman capable of great love and great hatred. Like a mythological goddess, she sets out to take personal revenge on a city of sin. What follows reads like an eighteenth-century tale of intrigue, children’s games played by grownups, or a burlesque of a mythological plot. There is a parallel plot about the banished son, a refugee from an unspecified catastrophe. His shrunken masculine world contrasts with the brilliantly colored world of Grandma Levana. A blind man, a mute and a chicken improvise to meet their basic daily needs, while ceaselessly searching for something they have already found, or will never find. All that remains for them is the experience of loss, dangling between memory and paradise.