{"id":36168,"date":"2021-01-29T03:53:19","date_gmt":"2021-01-29T11:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=36168"},"modified":"2021-01-27T13:15:50","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T21:15:50","slug":"interview-insightful-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2021\/01\/29\/interview-insightful-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview insightful, fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, whose latest novel is The Last Interview<\/em>, opens the JCC Jewish Book Festival Feb. 20. (photo from JBF)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival opens online Feb. 20, with Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, whose latest novel, The Last Interview<\/em>, brilliantly sprinkles facts amid a lot of fiction and interjects humour into much pathos. It entertains, of course, and, as all good books do, it raises many salient points that will get readers thinking \u2013 and feeling \u2013 about, in this case, storytelling, marriage, truth, parenting, friendship, lies, family, identity, media, politics and relationships. So, life.<\/p>\n

In The Last Interview<\/em>, the protagonist, who is suffering from a chronic form of depression and writer\u2019s block, responds to an interview sent to him \u201cby an internet site editor who collected surfers\u2019 questions.\u201d He later notes, \u201cIt was supposed to be only an interview, nothing else, but slowly \u2013 it seems I can\u2019t do it any other way \u2013 I\u2019ve been turning it into a story. I was supposed to leave Dikla and the kids and the dysthymia out of it. And all of them are in it.\u201d This inability to stop himself from telling stories about others in his published writing is an Achilles\u2019 heal in his personal life, but a boon to his professional one.<\/p>\n

His interview answers are sometimes short and direct:<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you manage to deal with the loneliness that\u2019s part of writing?<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, most often, they are quite involved, going into more detail, retrospection and introspection than the questioners would ever have expected. We learn about his failing marriage, but also its sweet beginnings. We are privy to his feelings about his best friend, who is dying of cancer. We see how he struggles to be a good father to his three kids. We hear some of his travel adventures. We witness his attempts to extricate himself from an unwanted speech-writing gig. We share his discomforts with the Israeli-Palestinian situation. We find out a bit about his motivations for writing:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I don\u2019t write, I have nowhere to put my memories, and that\u2019s dangerous. I have a problem. I don\u2019t forget anything. My forgetting mechanism is completely screwed up. All the partings, the deaths, the unexploited opportunities. They are all trapped in my body, and writing is the only way to release them \u2026 if I don\u2019t occasionally unburden myself of the weight of some of those memories, I won\u2019t be able to breathe. No air will enter my body. Or leave it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of his current creative block \u2013 \u201cI was supposed to be writing a novel this year. Instead, I\u2019m writing answers to this interview\u201d \u2013 is that he and his wife are becoming more distant. \u201cI can\u2019t say that I became a writer to win Dikla\u2019s heart, but I can assume that with another, less stimulating woman, I wouldn\u2019t be writing.\u201d He notes that, since his first letter to her, \u201cIn fact, everything I\u2019ve written since then, eight books, is one very long letter addressed to her.\u201d At the end of a lengthy response to the question, \u201cAll of your books are written in the same style. Have you ever thought of writing something completely different? Maybe science fiction? Fantasy?\u201d he says that genre wouldn\u2019t make any difference: \u201cIn any case, it would turn out that, once again, I wrote about an impossible love.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>While the overall mood of The Last Interview<\/em> is solemn, there are many funny parts. One especially hilarious section is the writer\u2019s response to the question, \u201cWhen will they produce a film adaptation of your latest book? When I read it, I could actually imagine the movie.\u201d As the writer shares the details of an encounter with a filmmaker of a similar opinion, the conversation cynically \u2013 but with the ring of truth \u2013 moves from flattery to the many ways in which the movie will ultimately be unrecognizable from the book, yet concluding nonetheless with the filmmaker enthusing, \u201cThe minute I finished it, I said to my wife: This is a movie!\u201d<\/p>\n

With a writer as intelligent, sensitive and amusing as Nevo and an interviewer as experienced as the Globe and Mail<\/em>\u2019s Marsha Lederman, the book festival\u2019s opening event should be well worth attending. For tickets to it, and for the full lineup of events, visit jccgv.com\/jewish-book-festival<\/a>. The festival runs to Feb. 25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, whose latest novel is The Last Interview, opens the JCC Jewish Book Festival Feb. 20. (photo from JBF) This year\u2019s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival opens online Feb. 20, with Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, whose latest novel, The Last Interview, brilliantly sprinkles facts amid a lot of fiction and interjects […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[4041,20232,6133,7699,4330,7556,3597,9011,7381],"class_list":["post-36168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-cherie-smith-jcc-jewish-book-festival","tag-eshkol-nevo","tag-fiction","tag-humour","tag-israel","tag-marsha-lederman","tag-politics","tag-social-commentary","tag-writing"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}