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The Perils of Hybridity: Resisting the Postcolonial Perspective in A. B. Yehoshua's The Liberating Bride
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 December 2009
Extract
The Liberating Bride (2001) figures as the most discursive of A. B. Yehoshua's novels. It follows the comings and goings of Yochanan Rivlin, an aging Middle East scholar, as he tries to discover the untold cause of his son's failed marriage and struggles to breathe life into his own moribund study of the causes of internal violence in contemporary Algiers. The novel abounds in the minutiae of everyday life and the often inane nature of human conversation. Its progression is intermittently impeded by eruptions of social comedy and political parody. It dwells on the myriad routines of marital, familial, and social transactions and gives ample scope to arcane academic disputations. But this seemingly sprawling narrative surface generates a carefully crafted deep structure by means of which the novel conducts a wide-ranging exploration of personal and political conundrums. As in many of his previous novels, Yehoshua's practice of constructing analogies between family situations and national issues enables him to engage psychological motivations, moral considerations, and ideological determinants that affect both the private and the public spheres of life.
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- Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2009
References
* The publishers of the English translation of this novel changed its title from the original, The Liberating Bride (Ha-kalah ha-meshaḥreret), to The Liberated Bride. While this may be a more marketable choice, it deprives the title of its intended meaning. For the purpose of this essay, I have retained the original title.
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