The coat of the title belongs to André, a handsome, enigmatic
French dancer, who arrives one day at a kibbutz guest house with his friends
Jennifer and Hans, and stays for three days. His pink coat, pale like the shade
of a conch shell, is the focus of longings of the narrator, a nameless woman
who lives in the kibbutz but came from elsewhere. The two have a three-day
affair which she calls "an étude, or an interlude". It ends when the
Frenchman drives away in a taxi. Both have vague identities: he is from Alsace;
she has come to the kibbutz after a disappointment in Love.
The slight plot is secondary. A love story in the romantic
manner, it in fact defies the formula at every turn. Expectations build up like
many-hued bubbles, but pop in the air. The disappointments accumulate during
the story, building to one enormous sorrow, a mountain of yearnings.
The Man in the Pink Raincoat actually revolves around an invisible center in the form of
a human male. He is a bundle of qualities but has no individuality. He is the
essence of a longed-for male, with an erotic dimension, devoid of time, place,
culture or history.
ENGLISH TRANSLATION AVAILABLE (for publishers only).
Full of
Poignant female self-irony … Very Good.
Hörzu
Delicate,
poetical, with a sense of humor and no happy ending – an enrichment to any
library.
Christina Ulz, Bücherei Nachrichten (Austria)
Noga Treves
tells her story easily and fluently … With the capacity for sympathetic understanding,
she gives vividness to her characters. Most recommended.
BLS-Informationsdienst
A story
full of poetry and serenity. Many readers may find their own feelings reflected
here.
Der Bund (Switzerland)
This
debut novel will attract a circle of demanding readers.
Marianne Jonzeck, ekz-informationsdiens
We gain
insight into the female psyche through the original and poetic language of the
novel … The high level and originality of the language cannot be ignored.
Gerhard Frisch, Die Gemeinde (Austria)
The first
novel of the Israeli dancer and writer has received excellent reviews in her
home country and should also be of interest here.
Schweizer Bibliotheksdient
A delicate book, elusive, vulnerable … The only certainty in the book is the enormous desolation of the
kibbutz experience. Treves establishes this desolation in a manner that is
astonishing in its brilliance and effectiveness. You read and laugh because of
the exquisite precision of the language, the niceness of the perception, the
paranoid sensitivity of the feminine eye … Treves' narrator, her mind full of past artistic
attempts to render the romantic object … touches the elusive topic of her
longings and manages to give them fresh form once again ... An enormous achievement … The Man in the Pink
Raincoat reveals a story-teller of exceptional brilliance, a scintillating
master of irony … And she has humor, which is even rarer.
Ariel Hirschfeld, Haaretz
One of the most impressive and promising writers to emerge from the 80s.
Prof. Menachem Perry
An impressive work.
Anat Levit, Davar
This is not a story
that follows a routine formula … Clearheadedly and cleverly, Treves tells a
love story on a number of levels … She immerses us in the atmosphere of a
magical fable … It would have been easy to slide into sickly sweet melodrama or
a cynical, wiseacre, uncompassionate narrative. Noga Treves overcomes these
landmines by using sophistication and wit, and by means of crystalline
precision in her descriptions. We do not have the space to enumerate all of the
superlatives of this unique and promising novella. All that can be done is to
recommend reading and rereading it, and to find within it each time a new,
refreshing and inspiring statement.
The Kugel Prize
Committee
[This book is
deserving of the prize because of] the wisdom in it, the freshness, the humor.
This is humor that omits arrogance and pomposity from the words and comes so
close to the reader that it touches them.
The Jerusalem
Foundation Prize Committee