Rhyming Life and Death
By Amos Oz
Translated by Nicholas de Lange
Chatto & Windus £12.99, 155 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Amos Oz’s beguiling novella begins with a knowing wink. It is 1983 in Tel Aviv and a celebrated novelist is preparing to appear at a book club meeting in the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack Cultural Centre.

Finding his star attraction dithering outside, an administrator asks him if he’s heard the one about the circumciser who’s late for a circumcision. He apparently hasn’t, and the diligent mandarin – whom Oz describes as a “fireman’s hose aiming jets of enthusiasm and social commitment in every direction” – promises to share with him later his observations about the difference between a joke and a witticism.

The promise is a tease, tantalising but unfulfilled. Indeed much of this funny and philosophical book, which unfolds over eight hours of a single evening, is like an elaborate set-up without a punchline.

It’s also a surprisingly playful departure for Oz, following A Tale of Love and Darkness, his memoir of the founding of Israel and of his mother’s suicide. A bestseller in Israel, Love and Darkness was Dickensian in its sweep. In Rhyming Life and Death, Oz turns inward, to the mental gymnastics of writerly creation and the mortal nature of literary fame.

The lead character, named only “the Author”, is bored witless by the inane questions he imagines he’ll take from the audience that evening. In his writer’s brain he begins the rather insalubrious exercise of creating fictional lives for the faces he sees in front of him at the reading. The snickering figure with the “distinct look of a trade-union hack” he renames Dr Pessach Yikhat. The sad looking young fellow he images to be a certain Yuval Dahan, a suffering, near-suicidal Israeli Werther who will carry on a furtive affair with one Miriam Nehorait, the broad-faced woman sitting in the front row.

A small universe of little characters issues from these quick mental notes, characters that are remarkably animated despite their parsimonious beginnings.

But they are also sharply drawn by Oz with an acidic, satirical pen. His scorn is most devastatingly unleashed on the Author, a smug scrivener whose own self-questioning forms the fascinating underbelly to Rhyming Life and Death. However, this is not just a deconstruction of the writing life. It is a book about reading too.

Much of the novel involves a hazy one-night stand between the Author and the “professional reader”, Rochele Reznik, whom he attempts to seduce after the book club event by telling yet more stories. It’s impossible to tell whether the dalliance actually occurs: where the Author stops and Oz begins is a matter of the reader’s interpretation. At any rate, the erotic scene, which Oz describes in overwritten detail, ends with the Author’s inability to perform. The distractions created by mental images of two of his more unappealing characters leave him, well, blocked.

For all its bodice-ripping language, the passage is rather comical: “Who,” the Author asks himself, “needs your shabby fantasies about all kinds of worn-out sex scenes with frustrated waitresses, lonely readers who live with cats, or runners-up in Eilat Queen of the Waves contests from years ago?” It’s a question he can’t really answer. As the Author says: “You cannot write without looking behind you; like Lot’s wife. And in doing so you turn yourself and them [the characters] into blocks of salt.”

Into the novel’s other strands, Oz weaves very tightly the fictional story of an earlier Israeli poet, the writer Tsefania Beit-Halachmi. Once wildly popular, now largely forgotten, Beit-Halachmi wrote a weekly newspaper column and a book of verse titled Rhyming Life and Death. Unlike the Author, Beit-Halachmi seems to have no hovering anxieties about his writing: “He represented the younger generation, the muscular, suntanned native-born sabras ... dedicated, morally responsible and wonderfully sensitive on the inside.” He wrote directly about the issues of his and Israel’s younger self, from the tide of immigrants to housing shortages to political corruption.

Now the Author imagines him sitting toothless in a retirement home gazing out on to a beautiful grove of cypresses and “wondering whether death can be entirely, unrecognisably different from life”.

Oz doesn’t let the Author deign to address Beit-Halachmi’s question but the spirit of his query pervades this enjoyable little parable of a book.

Eric Banks is the former editor of Bookforum