Israeli writer David Grossman’s gorgeous new novel is one of the most haunting I’ve read all year. To the End of the Land tells the story of Ora, who as a teen fell in love with two friends, Ilan and Avram.
She ends up marrying Ilan, but the three are linked by their early years together and by the aftermath of the 1973 war, in which funny, larger-than-life Avram is captured and tortured for weeks. His two friends spend months nursing him back to health, but he ultimately feels he can’t be with them anymore. (Complicating matters, Ora and Avram have a son.)
In 2000, their boy, Ofer, is now grown and is almost through his mandatory military service when he volunteers for an additional 28-day mission.
Struck with dread, Ora decides she won't be a sitting target for the military “notifiers,” who might come to the door. “[I]f they don't find her, if they can't find her,” she decides with flawless magical logic, “he won't get hurt.”
Grabbing two backpacks and leaving behind her cellphone, Ora heads for the north of the country and starts walking, determined that she won’t go home until the 28 days are up. She also grabs Avram and hauls him with her, spending the time telling him about his son’s life and the family she and Ilan made, which was broken by an event a year earlier. But as they walk, her descriptions of Ofer are so vivid, they begin to serve as a eulogy for the life she’s determined to save with her quixotic mission.
Grossman has a deep understanding of magical thinking. He writes in an afterword that he began “To the End of the Land,” in 2003, when his oldest son was almost through his military service and about 18 months before his younger son, Uri, was to join. “At the time,” he writes, “I had the feeling – or rather, a wish – that the book I was writing would protect him.”
In August of 2006, “in the final hours of the Second Lebanon War, Uri was killed in Southern Lebanon.”
Grossman writes that, at that point, most of the book was finished. “What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written.”
Those echoes will linger powerfully with readers long afterward.
