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Grove Press
March 2013
On Sale: March 19, 2013
350 pages
ISBN: 0802121209
EAN: 9780802121202
Kindle: B007P5WKT2
Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
From one of the most important contemporary voices to emerge
from the Middle East comes a gripping tale of love and
betrayal, honesty and artifice, which asks whether it is
possible to truly reinvent ourselves, to shed our old skin
and start anew.
Second Person Singular follows
two men, a successful Arab criminal attorney and a social
worker-turned-artist, whose lives intersect under the most
curious of circumstances. The lawyer has a thriving practice
in the Jewish part of Jerusalem, a large house, a Mercedes,
speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, and is in love with his wife
and two young children. In an effort to uphold his image as
a sophisticated Israeli Arab, he often makes weekly visits
to a local bookstore to pick up popular novels. On one
fateful evening, he decides to buy a used copy of Tolstoy's
The Kreutzer Sonata, a book his wife once
recommended. To his surprise, inside he finds a small white
note, a love letter, in Arabic, in her handwriting. I
waited for you, but you didn't come. I hope everything's all
right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was
wonderful. Call me tomorrow? Consumed with suspicion and
jealousy, the lawyer slips into a blind rage over the
presumed betrayal. He first considers murder, revenge, then
divorce, but when the initial sting of humiliation and hurt
dissipates, he decides to hunt for the book's previous
owner—a man named Yonatan, a man who is not easy to track
down, whose identity is more complex than imagined, and
whose life is more closely aligned with his own than
expected. In the process of dredging up old ghosts and
secrets, the lawyer tears the string that holds all of their
lives together.
A Palestinian who writes in Hebrew,
Sayed Kashua defies classification and breaks through
cultural barriers. He communicates, with enormous emotional
power and a keen sense of the absurd, the particular
alienation and the psychic costs of people struggling to
straddle two worlds. Second Person Singular is a
deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing
dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.
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