This little squib was first published in Israel in 2007 and I wonder whether Amos Oz appeared on the platform at any literary events to promote it. The novella's plot is simply this: an Author (capitalised but never named) in his mid-forties,sometime in the 1980s, addressing a monthly meeting of The Good Book Club in Tel Aviv. The first two pages list the standard questions he expects to be asked - “Why do you write? Why do you write the way you do? Do you draw the material for your stories from your inspiration or directly from life?” etc. Remarking that “there are no simple, straightforward answers”, he proceeds in the rest of the book to provide a kind of answer by inventing brief lives for all the people he comes across in the next few hours, from the careworn waitress serving him in a cafe before the meeting to the three people on the platform with him and assorted members of the audience. By the end of the book he has accumulated 39 characters, including himself, and helpfully lists them all in case the reader has lost track of them or failed to notice the fecundity of his imagination.

Oz's title, Rhyming Life and Death, is taken from a book of poems published by a once famous but now almost forgotten naive poet, Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, who, whether invented by Oz or not, seems to have been a kind of Israeli McGonagall, as earnest as he was inept. The elderly chairman of the meeting quotes him in his introduction (“You'll always find them side by side:/never a groom without his bride”) and further gems from Beit-Halachmi are quoted at intervals through the text. He represents, presumably, the simple, innocent author as against the sophisticated and world-weary one who is telling the story. Indeed, speculating whether Beit-Halachmi can still be alive, our Author imagines him in an old people's home, sitting peacefully in an armchair on the veranda and served with lemon tea and a sugar lump, chewing a piece of white bread with the crust removed.

There is another innocent author in the audience, an aspirant this time, a pimply 16-year-old with pebble lenses who wants the Author to read his poems and for whom the Author invents a brief relationship, over a sticky fruit compote, with the broad-faced, heavily built woman sitting near the front. She, he decides, has abandoned any care for her appearance and become thirsty for culture, but her relationship with the pimply poet is swiftly ended by a peeping neighbour and although she continues to prepare her compote for him, the youth never dares return to her flat.

The Author is less sympathetic towards two other members of the audience, an old man with bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows, whom he names Dr Pessat Yikhat, and another he calls Arnold Bartok. Yikhat might be a retired teacher and will almost certainly stand up at the end, not to ask a question but to give his negative opinion of “contemporary Hebrew literature”. Bartok, however, shabby and gaunt, who “looks like a monkey that has lost most of its fur” and whom the Author suspects of repeatedly sniggering during his talk, gets the full force of his vengeance. He is a man suffering from terrible piles, who bombards ministers, editors and politicians with memos, and lives at home with his paralysed mother, sharing a bed with her and emptying her chamber pots in a lean-to lavatory in the yard.

But it must be said that the Author, who has a daytime job as an accountant, hardly presents himself as a hero, or even of much intrinsic interest. His main story, half real and half invented, is his attempt to go home after the meeting with a youngish woman, “pretty yet not attractive”, who has read extracts from his works during the event. Hesitantly and awkwardly she succeeds in dissuading him, but he spends the rest of the night wandering the streets and, among further details of his other characters' lives, imagining the encounter that might have taken place, in which he gives her sexual pleasure but then finds himself embarrassingly inadequate.

This is a teasing, glancing book, sustained by Oz's fluent, relaxed tone, but ultimately undermined by its subject; for how can any reader take the lives of improvised characters seriously? Only, of course, if the author takes them seriously in the first place.

Life and Death by Amos Oz
trans Nicholas de Lange
Chatto £12.99 pp160

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