By Meir Shalev
I did not enjoy A Pigeon and a Boy in the least. I felt I was being beaten over the head with Biblical themes instead of pleasantly delighted by resonances of them. I did not appreciate the heaping helping of Zionist mishigas in the book, either.
And there were plenty of technical problems with the book. The author could not decide whether his main character was addressing his deceased mother or talking about her. The ramp-up to the merging of the book’s present and past threads was painfully long. And, almost as soon as the threads came together, I guessed the ending. Two chapters featured talking pigeons. Characters were wooden, except for perhaps Meshulam, who was the one character I liked the most despite his forced labor as a device for greasing plot points.
Yairi’s relationship with Tirza is told, not shown. Yaacov and Raya, and his ex-wife Liora, are two-dimensional yekkes. The one-week reconciliation with Liora had me scratching my head. Numerous chapters devoted far too much detail to incidental characters, such as the Dutch bird-watchers in the last chapters. And there was more pigeon lore and craft than anyone — with perhaps the exception of a pigeon handler — could ever stomach.
The climax of the story — pardon the pun — was a ridiculous travesty of medical probability, as a half-dead soldier, ripped apart by machine gun fire, channels his skill as a premature ejaculator to fill a vial with semen to be sent by carrier pigeon to his love. Sure, I comprehended that this was a metaphor for the triumph of life in Israel over death in European ghettos and Konzentrationslagern. I grasped that Yair’s house, built in part by Bedouins on Arab land, was a metaphor for the creation of Israel. I understood the repeated “and it was good” from Genesis when each new phase of Yair’s home was completed. Not to mention the sabbath bride and all of it.
But, all in all, I found the book ham-fisted and a horrible slog. I would have preferred a book that handled the themes of identity and belonging that Shalev was probabably aiming at with much more delicacy and literary skill.
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