More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman review – the personal is political

David Grossman’s follow-up to the International Booker-winning A Horse Walks Into a Bar is a Russian doll of a novel, a book of secrets wrapped within secrets. It’s told by Gili, a film-maker, a damaged young woman who has already tried to end her life once. In a narrative that is teasingly digressive, threading back and forward between different time periods, between first- and third-person voices, we slowly learn the tragic story of Gili and her family, the way the brutal legacy of the 20th-century’s violence has written itself into the lives of these decent, wounded people.

It’s the early 1960s and Gili’s grandfather, Tuvia, lives with his sickly wife and their son, Rafael, on an unnamed kibbutz, a cheerful place of progressive politics and honest toil. The wife finally succumbs to her illness and Tuvia remarries, his new bride a recent Yugoslavian immigrant, Vera Novak, a widow and the mother of the beautiful Nina. Rafael falls in love with Nina, who is known at school as “the Sphinx” – a proud, distant, enigmatic figure. The two sleep together – although it’s soon clear that this initial encounter is more an act of rebellion on Nina’s part than anything else. It’s the start of a long and unequal relationship, with Rafael picking up the pieces whenever Nina falls apart. Then Gili is born and, unwilling to take on the mantle of mother, Nina flees.

The novel moves to 2008 and the 90th birthday of Vera, which the family has come together to celebrate, even Nina, who after giving birth to Gili took herself off on a series of increasingly self-destructive adventures, first to New York, where she slept her way around the city, then to an island north of Lapland. Rafael and Nina pick up where they left off, his devotion to her at once touching and pathetic, her behaviour more erratic than ever. Soon Nina lets out the truth: she has a degenerative illness, her memory slowly erasing itself. She has come home to Israel in the knowledge that her time is running out.

It’s as if Rafael has been waiting for just such a moment: “I simply know how to love her whatever state she’s in,” Rafael tells Gili. “That’s my thing in the world: loving one person who is not easy to love.” Gili has already been making a film of Vera’s birthday; now Rafael urges her to turn that film into something else, a record of Nina’s life before she loses all memory of it. This, though, requires the family to take a journey together, one that will take them into Nina’s past, and that of her mother, uncovering secrets and sorrows that help to explain the desperate spiral of Nina’s life.

The second half of the book cuts between the family’s journey to Croatia, a country only recently emerged from its own bitter war, and Vera’s recollections of being held in a camp by Tito’s brutal secret police, the UBDA. These memories of the prison island of Goli Otok are horrifying: “the beatings and the torture… the bedbugs and the swamps and the rocks”. The reader gets a sense of history as a never-ending stream of violence, with Vera’s parents dispatched to Auschwitz, her own suffering under Tito and the family’s current existence in an Israel with its own “charming conflict”. We discover that during her incarceration Vera was forced to make a terrible decision, one that would echo down through the generations of her family.

The Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen said: “I don’t think it is possible to write anything in Israel without referring to politics, and if you were to decide to write something without referring to politics, then that in itself is a political decision.” More Than I Love My Life is at face value about an Israeli family who remain largely untouched by the violence in their homeland – it is a love story, a story about a family and their myriad individual tragedies. But it is also about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. It is, in the end, about Israel. Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen, this is another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you’ll read this year.