Holy Lands By Amanda Sthers

Bloomsbury, £20

Amanda Sthers is a French dramatist, film-maker and author, both popular and critically acclaimed in the French-speaking world. Holy Lands is her first novel to appear in English, her own translation of Les Terres Saintes (2009). It is an apt introduction for English-speaking readers: the subject matter — neurotic, middle-class, Jewish family life — and tone are reminiscent of Woody Allen and Phillip Roth, both of whom Sthers name-checks.
The novel relates how Harry Rosenmerck, a retired Jewish cardiologist, moves from America to Israel to take up the unusual project of running a pig farm on the Galilean shore. A vigorous debate ensues with Moshe Cattan, the benevolent and understanding rabbi of Nazareth. Harry’s “reasonable” transgression (as he describes it) in his choice of livestock incurs the hostility of the local Jewish, Muslim, and Christian populations. Meanwhile, his ex-wife, daughter, and estranged son attempt to make their own ways through life, confronting challenges that connect with Harry’s journey. 
Though the Rosenmercks’ problems are sometimes grave, the underlying mood is of humane comedy.

To add to the fun, Holy Lands keeps to epistolary form. None of the characters seems to have entirely caught up with 21st-century telephony; they communicate by letter or email, and all we see of them is their correspondence. Thanks to Sthers’s deft touch this device does not seem forced; it complements the atmosphere of eccentricity and lends the characters space for psychological development and humorous self-expression.

Although indebted to the legacy of male, Jewish-American comedy, Sthers differs significantly from it, particularly with respect to the theme of sexuality.  Holy Lands takes up the widely shared worry that the tradition is disfigured by misogyny and machismo. 

In one of the novel’s most powerful passages, a young woman breaks up with her lover, a senior academic, explaining that, while he might “understand a few passages from Roth”, he knows nothing of real emotions. She advises him to read Romain Gary’s novel Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid, which dissects the stock figure of the “older man”. 

Harry eventually learns to partake of this chastened spirit. “Why do we attach love to desire,” he asks Rabbi Cattan, a rhetorical question that proves central to his quest. Grasping its ramifications leads to the revaluation of all his key relationships, especially that with his son, whose way of loving both is, and is not, very different from his own.

Holy Lands is a highly accomplished short novel. Perhaps it suffers occasionally from a certain glibness, as characters dash off specious bon mots and tendentious rants, which mostly go unchallenged. Yet it contains a multitude of perspectives extraordinarily well. It is a slim volume with a very capacious heart.   

Alun David is a freelance reviewer