Het Eeuwige Volk Kent Geen Angst (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
This is not really a novel with a plot, but a series of connected short stories told in separate chapters by each of 3 Israeli small town girls who are drafted into the army after high school. Their army service will probably define who they are in the future: its boredom, its dangers, its damages, its sexual impact on the rest of their lives. We get to know Yael, Avishag and Lea as they complete each part of their 2 year service and a bit of what happens to them after they go on with their lives. It is a little hard to know which of the girls is speaking in the first person without her being addressed by someone--their characters are in ways very similar: factual, emotionless, comical--at times sounding like typical teenagers when they talk of rock and movie stars, celebrities much as American teenagers would. Shani Boianjiu is an Israeli yet wrote in English. Too bad that all Hebrew phrases were dropped. A book written in English about French people would contain phrases like: maman, pere, merci, oui, etc. For Boianjiu, ima is mother, hello/goodbye is Peace which sounds jarring for shalom, sometimes silly as in "service cab" for "sherut." Some Hebrew phrases could have been kept. A very implausible incident: A Gazan terrorist is sheltered in Tel Aviv by one of the girls who was present at his murder of a soldier. I cannot imagine this happening. The book was nominated for a couple of prizes. Boianjiu will have to do some hard work to prove she was deserving of these nominations. I read this book for book club -- or rather, I tried to read this book for book club -- and I really did not enjoy it.It's about how miserable it is to be a teenage drafted soldier in Israel, and how bad war is. At least, I guess that's what it's about. There are many scenes of unpleasant experiences that teenage drafted soldiers in Israel go through. Maybe it's about how it's even worse when you're female, but I'm not sure -- the main characters are female, but there isn't anything about their experiences that couldn't have happened to a man. So I don't know about that.But there is no story -- no plot, no character development, no trajectory. The book doesn't *go* anywhere. Nothing really happens -- or rather, a series of events happens, but it's not a narrative, it's just a disjointed, disconnected series of anecdotes. Oh, and there are a couple of different narrators -- at least, I think there are -- but they all seem kind of the same.Plus maybe I'm not smart enough, or deep enough, or insightful enough, or well enough informed about the Israeli culture, but I couldn't figure out what the heck the narrator was talking about half the time. The prose is extremely elliptical, with random comments and observations that I think are supposed to create some kind of mosaic of experience, or something very literary, but I just didn't like it and didn't get it.As I said, I couldn't finish it, but I did flip through the rest of the book to see if anything was ever going to happen, and it doesn't seem to.
What do You think about Het Eeuwige Volk Kent Geen Angst (2012)?
Indringend, verontrustend, humoristisch en origineel. Aan het slot vliegt het verhaal uit de bocht.
—sjw
great perspective on the Israeli requirement for mandatory service in the Army...
—taylor
Not an easy read. Pretty disturbing at times. I thought it was brilliant though.
—lals
This book is emotionally brutal, but I believe that's the point.
—zoey
Was expecting to find this more engaging than it was.
—smalleyl
