UFO Info Week-End

The shops around Soho may be boasting garish red hearts and cards with sugary messages for

The shops around Soho may be boasting garish red hearts and cards with sugary messages for St Valentine’s Day, but Grossman offers a much more visceral interpretation of love. Every gesture or observation he makes, every piece of music he hears while he is writing, must be tunnelled through them. “To write a novel is a bit like hiding a family during a war,” says Grossman, whose Jewish father emigrated from Galicia, Poland, to Israel in 1936. “You are responsible for all their needs; from the coming down to the cellar where they hide, to telling them news from the front line, to entertaining their tormented souls and emptying their night pots.” No wonder, then, that Grossman talks of Miriam, a character from the new novel, as a woman real enough to have posed for its cover.But while Be My Knife (Bloomsbury, £16.99, translated by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz) is a head-spinning, breathtaking journey into the darkest corners of his characters’ souls, it is also a celebration of the transformative power of language.

Miriam and her epistolary lover, Yair, create their own world, where they enact fantasies and confess to childhood crimes and secret longings. They begin to live through their letters to each other, revealing powers of concentration, honesty and imagination that their respective spouses have long overlooked.Their relationship begins when they meet by chance at a class reunion in Jerusalem, and Yair impetuously sends Miriam a letter. The story is told largely through his correspondence to Miriam, whose words begin to seep through into his writing. “I hope the reader feels as if he’s peeping into something very intimate, even to feel this slight embarrassment,” says Grossman.

“Yair and Miriam correspond, not in the cute aspect of lovers. They are similar in the dark curves of their souls, in the wounds, in the places that have not been understood by others.”The lovers create a hermetic territory where words can gain a purity of meaning. Grossman compares the lovers’ desire for “pure language” to his earlier novel, The Book of Intimate Grammar, in which a child named Aaron creates a hospital for sick words polluted by their distorted usage. “He purifies words he absorbs from the outside in complicated, bureaucratic ceremonies,” says Grossman.

“Only when they are purified is Aaron entitled to utter them; only then are they his own.” There is something of this child in Grossman, who says that he has been driven as a writer to break through the suffocating language of politics and the meaningless clich?that often pass for writing.While first and foremost a novelist, Grossman has also been an outspoken critic of the Israeli government and has argued passionately for peace. During the 1980s, when he anchored a morning news radio programme in Israel, he began to notice how reports were massaged for public consumption. “All the time I had arguments with my bosses because I’d say, ‘I’m not going to read this report; it’s not the right thing.’ You see the deception; you see how we lie to people.”He began travelling to the Occupied Territories in 1987, where he lived for several months before the intifada to research his book on the Palestinians, The Yellow Wind. There he discovered a paucity of words to describe what he was witnessing. “I was taught to describe this reality in a different way; I was part of the machinery.” After more arguments with his news editors, he was given the sack.Meanwhile, The Yellow Wind became a controversial but respected book in Israel.