The Fourth Lie
These 14 stories of life in provincial Israel are populated by naive characters in a rural atmosphere where everyone knows everyone else. The narrator in many of the stories is an adolescent girl. Sensitive to the underlying tensions in this ostensibly peaceful hothouse, she is a clear-eyed observer of the xenophobia, insanity, betrayal and loneliness that lurk in the community. A woman is raped and keeps silent. An ageing spinster tries to attract a man. A young girl suffers agonies because of her deformed arm.
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“Gilboa conveys the suffocation, the provinciality and the complex human relations that characterize small-town Israel, She draws the landscape and the people with fine precision.”