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Summary
Summary
From Israel's highly acclaimed author, a novel about a musician who returns home and finds the rhythm of her life interrupted and forever changed
Noga, forty-two and a divorcee, is a harpist with an orchestra in the Netherlands. Upon the sudden death of her father, she is summoned home to Jerusalem by her brother to help make decisions in urgent family and personal matters--including hanging on to a rent-controlled apartment even as they place their reluctant mother in an assisted-living facility. Returning to Israel also means facing the former husband who left her when she refused him children, but whose passion for her remains even though he is remarried and the father of two.
For her imposed three-month residence in Jerusalem, the brother finds her work--playing roles as an extra in movies, television, opera. These new identities undermine the firm boundaries of behavior heretofore protected by the music she plays, and Noga, always an extra in someone else's story, takes charge of the plot.
The Extra is Yehoshua at his liveliest storytelling best--a bravura performance.Author Notes
Abraham B. Yehoshua, known commonly as A.B. Yehoshua, was born in Jerusalem on December 19, 1936. He studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has taught at high-school and university levels and is currently a professor of literature at Haifa University.
He is a novelist, essayist, and playwright. His first book of stories, The Death of the Old Man, was published in 1962. His novels include Mr. Mani, Open Heart, Five Seasons, and Friendly Fire. He won the Israeli Prize in 1994.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Yehoshua's (The Retrospective) latest novel, a woman leaves her comfort zone and returns to her childhood home, where she slowly begins peeling back the layers of experiences and relationships that have kept her from taking charge of her own story. Noga, a harpist in an orchestra, has lived in the Netherlands for years, but when her father's death leaves her mother alone in their Jerusalem apartment, her brother asks her to return to Israel to look after the rent-controlled unit while his mother tries out an assisted living facility in Tel Aviv. Noga agrees, temporarily leaving her adult life behind to work as an extra in Israeli movies, television, and operas and to wander the city, where she reconnects with her ex-husband and meets a varied cast of characters that makes up the backdrop of her story. The novel is beautifully written and Noga is a relatable heroine, but the slow pacing obscures the emotional stakes as Noga contemplates her future, her past, and her choices in life. Her interactions with others can feel wooden and falsely intimate, but the novel shines when Noga is given time and space alone with her thoughts and larger themes of family, love, music, and creativity, all depicted with Yehoshua's clarion style. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
After her father dies, Noga is summoned back to her Jerusalem home to help her family. For three months she will live in the family apartment, which is rent-controlled but overseen by an overzealous landlord, so her mother can stay in a retirement home on a trial basis. For Noga, 42, divorced, and childless, the task seems simple, but she must sacrifice three months in her role as lead harpist in a Netherlands orchestra, and her days are dull. Her brother finds her a position as a TV extra, but Noga's real challenge comes from facing the past she left behind. While wrestling with uncomfortable social situations involving the Orthodox Jewish family who lives upstairs, and dealing with her ex-husband, who still harbors strong feelings for the wife who refused to give him children, she must reexamine decisions made long ago and reconsider the person she has become. Though Israeli writer Yehoshua's latest (The Retrospective, 2013) is hampered by stilted dialogue and unexplored relationships, this story of family relationships and personal choices offers an insightful look at redemption and acceptance.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2016 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Noga, an Israeli harpist based in the Dutch city of Arnhem, confronts hidden truths about herself during a visit to Jerusalem following the death of her loving father. The 42-year-old Noga has agreed to stay for three months in her family's old apartment in an increasingly Orthodox section of Jerusalem while her mother tries out a retirement home in Tel Aviv. Noga's younger brother, Honi, a media producer, devised the plan. To keep Noga busy, he sets her up as an extra in various productions, among them an outdoor staging of the opera Carmen. The drama onstage is nearly met by the drama off it when Noga's ex-husband, Uriah, shows up. Though he's remarried and the father of two, he's still furious at her for her refusal to have children. Judging from her hilarious efforts to prevent the Hasidic kids from the apartment upstairs from brazenly sneaking into her mother's place to watch TV, she may not be cut out for motherhood. Noga reserves her greatest love for music; nothing thrills her more than joining her orchestra in an upcoming performance of Mozart's "Concerto for Flute and Harp." But as hinted at by her father's advice to always keep an eye out for Venus, from which her Hebrew name derives, the universe has its own designs on her. The ease with which Yehoshua captures the inner life of his quirky heroine in all its lush undertones and self-enforced solitude is special. For the great author of Five Seasons (1988) and The Liberated Bride (2003), this is a comparatively short book. But its terse, offhand narrative is rich in reflection and personal truth. Yehoshua's masterful portrayal of a female musician at a pivotal moment in her life is deep, unpredictable, and, in the end, surprisingly suspenseful. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
One of Israel's preeminent writers continues to reflect on Jewish identity in Israel as well as the changing makeup of the Israeli family. After the death of her father, Noga, a 42-year-old musician, returns from the Netherlands to Jerusalem, where she finds work playing roles as an extra and is forced to confront her ex-husband. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ONE At four in the morning the cell phone rings, its alarm forgotten from the day before, yet she doesn't turn off the wistful melody planted in the gadget by an elderly flutist who wanted to be remembered during her long visit to Israel. Nor, when quiet is restored, does she curl up under her parents' warm quilt to resume her interrupted sleep. Instead she tugs lightly on the levers of the electric bed and elevates its head, so that while still lying down she can scan the dawning Jerusalem sky, in search of the planet for which she was named. When she was a child, her father told her to look for that planet before sunrise or just after sunset. "Even if you don't find yourself in the sky," he said, "it's important to look up now and then, at least at the moon, which is smaller than your planet, just as your brother is smaller than you, but seems bigger to us because it's closer." And so, on this visit to Israel âe<-- âe On her brief visits to Israel in the years before her father's death, she would stay with old friends from the Academy of Music rather than at her parents' home. Contrary to what her brother, Honi, thought, this was not out of distaste for the new Orthodox neighbors who were turning the neighborhood "black." Actually she, who in recent years had kept her distance from Jerusalem and enjoyed the secure and liberal milieu of Europe, found it easy to believe in respectful, tolerant coexistence with a minority, even as it showed signs of becoming a majority. After all, in her youth, when she practiced her music on Shabbat, the neighbors did not protest. "In the ancient Temple they would play the harp on religious holidays," Mr. Pomerantz, the handsome Hasid who lived one floor above, once told her. "So it's nice for God-fearing people to know that you're now practicing for the coming of the Messiah." "But will they also let girls like me play music in the new Temple?" demanded the young musician, red-faced. "Also girls like you," affirmed the man, gazing at her, "and if, when the Messiah comes, the priests won't let you because you're a girl, we'll turn you into a handsome lad." Even this minor memory strengthens her belief in a local climate of tolerance, and unlike her brother, who fears his mother's being besieged by the ultra-Orthodox, Noga watches their bustling lives with no grudge or complaint, merely with the amused eye of a tourist or folklorist who welcomes all the songs of the world to sing out in full color. After her marriage, she had lived in Jerusalem for a few years with her husband, Uriah, but after leaving Jerusalem, and subsequently her husband, she preferred, on her occasional Friday night visits, to return after Shabbat dinner to Tel Aviv. Her parents' intimacy, which only deepened in old age, made things harder for her, not easier. They'd said nothing about her refusal to have children, had even made their peace with it, and still she sensed that it was a relief for them that she not spend the night in their space. That way she would not intrude on a couple fiercely faithful to their ancient, narrow wooden bed, where they would snuggle together in serene harmony. If one of them was alarmed by a strange dream, or woke up over some fresh worry, the other would immediately wake up too and continue a conversation that apparently took place while they were sleeping. Once, on a stormy Friday, lacking transportation back to Tel Aviv, Noga stayed over and slept in her childhood room, and during the night, between whistling winds and flashes of lightning, she saw her father walking with tiny steps from room to room, his head bent submissively and hands pressed to his chest, Buddhist fashion. From the double bed, a voice of gentle exasperation: "And what's the matter now?" "The lightning and thunder turned me all of a sudden from a Jew into a Chinaman," the father explained in a whisper, nodding his head graciously at the masses of Chinese who had come to wish him well. "But the Chinese don't walk like that." "What?" "They don't walk that way, the Chinese." "So who does walk like that?" "Japanese, only Japanese." "Then I'm Japanese," her father conceded, shortening his steps and circling the narrow double bed, bowing to the bride of his youth who lay before him. "What can I do, my love? The storm blew me from China to Japan and turned me into a Japanese." TWO The Sino-Japanese man was seventy-five when he died, amiable and funny to his last breath. One night his wife woke up to complete a thought she'd had before falling asleep, but was met with silence. At first she interpreted the silence as agreement, until she grew suspicious, tried shaking her husband and, while shaking him, realized that her lifelong companion had left the world with no pain and no complaint. During the mourning period, as she grieved with relatives and friends, she spoke with amazement but also resentment about his silent and rude exit. Since her husband had been an engineer, the supervisor of the water department of the city of Jerusalem, she joked that he had secretly engineered his own death, blocking the flow of blood to his brain the way he had sometimes blocked the water supply of ultra-Orthodox Jews who refused to pay their water bills to the Zionist municipality. "Had he revealed to me the secret of an easy death," she complained to her son and daughter, "I would spare you the ordeal of mine, which I know will take longer and be harder for all of us." "We'll manage the ordeal," her son solemnly promised, "on condition that you finally leave Jerusalem. Sell the apartment âe<-- âe "Afraid? Of what?" "That some religious fanatic will throw stones at the car." "So park outside the neighborhood and walk with the children, it'll be good exercise for all of you. Fear of the Orthodox is unbecoming, in my opinion." "It's not exactly fear .âe¯.âe¯. more like disgust." "Disgust? Why disgust? They're simple people, and like anyplace else, there are good ones and bad ones." "Of course, but you can't tell them apart. They all look alike, and even if they're all angels, they're not going to look after you. So they should stay where they are, and you, now that you're alone, should come and live near us." His sister kept quiet, not because what he was saying wasn't logical, but because she didn't believe that their mother would consent to leave Jerusalem âe<-- âe But Honi pressured his sister too. Now, after their father's death, it would be hard for him to look after his mother. "If you've left the country to escape responsibility for our parents," he accused his silent sibling, "at least help the one who stays on duty." Now she took offense. She had not left Israel to escape responsibility but because she had not found a position with any of the local orchestras. "You would have been accepted by many Israeli orchestras if you hadn't insisted on playing an aristocratic instrument instead of a democratic one." "Democratic?" She laughed. "What's a democratic instrument?" "Flute, violin, even trumpet." "Trumpet? You'll regret it." "I regret it already, but before you leave the country again, help me convince Ima to leave Jerusalem. That way, you can stay in Europe with your mind at ease till the end of your days." Excerpted from The Extra by A. B. Yehoshua All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.