In David Grossman's 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before. Lost to each other and themselves, mostly they seem out of touch with the world. But just occasionally you get a glimpse of how each one's peculiar and cherished form of insanity might be inseparable from the nation that spawned their virtual love affair. 'Somewhere in the universe,' Yair muses in one of his letters, 'there must be that other world we once talked about - a world of light.' But some people, 'unfit for such generous bounty and goodness', would find a world like that intolerable and commit suicide. 'Here, where we are,' he asks - 'is this the penal colony of that other world?' Perhaps every person here, 'man or woman, it doesn't matter, old or young', has already committed suicide.

LRB 18 March 2004 | PDF Download