A Tale of Love and Darkness: Reading Response

Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness talks about his own personal life. It is always interesting to read the autobiographies of author's whose other novels we have read in class, Oz's novel being one of my favorites, My Michael. 

A Tale of Love and Darkness seems to show a lot of where Oz was coming from when he wrote My Michael. The issues prevalent to people living in Jerusalem in the mid 20th century are ones that I otherwise would never have picked up on, being an American born on the cusp of the 21st century in Massachusetts. I constantly have to remind myself that while autobiographies are an account of an individual's life, they are also a social commentary as much as anything else. Oz's book served to reiterate this to me once more.

The complexity of the relationships between the different members of Oz's family was one of the most striking things for me, especially the relationship between his grandmother and grandfather. He painted a picture of a man in his grandfather that I would have most liked to meet. Though he went to elope with Oz's grandmother as a young man, he allegedly fell in love with another girl along the way and was said to have been dragged to the altar by his ear, and dragged all the way to Jerusalem. Throughout the course of their marriage, the grandmother is fairly brutal with the grandfather, ordering him about to beat the carpets and clean things- cater to her germaphobia, and basically carry out a miserable existence. Still, he is described as a kind and intellectual man. My favorite part comes, however, when the grandmother dies and Oz describes the kind of sexual awakening he believes occurred for his grandfather. Now in his seventies, the man was suddenly freed from a life of deep enslavement and took advantage of it, by taking his sexual pleasure among as many lovers as he could find.

"When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid, or Vancouver," [Oz 23.] On this same page where he writes such a brilliant and fascinating description of the way that books survive man, he also manages to sexualize books, and indeed, much of the novel is fascinated with sexual depictions of things. It seems odd that even as a small boy Oz would have picked up on the sexual undertones and aspects of things in so much of the world, but then again, one must remember this is Oz looking back at his youth through the lens of age.

Once again, the autobiography is very rightly titled. A Tale of Love and Darkness seems to correctly describe the way Oz feels about life, as also exampled in his novel My Michael: that love [and sex] are often, if not always, tied up with darkness and despair as well. In fact, it seems nearly impossible to have one without the other. They go together, just like life goes with death, and so goes the story of Oz's life as well.