One of Israel's most prolific and successful writers and a committed advocate for peace in the region, A.B. Yehoshua manages to enter the inner worlds of his characters, both men and women, with intense honesty and compassion. The Retrospective, his tenth novel tells the story of an aging film director and his longtime muse/actress summoned to a Spanish pilgrimmage city for a retrospective of their earlier work. Their shared and complicated past, embodied in each of these films, as comes under scrutiny, highlighting the tensions and conflicts which existed between Yair Moses, the Ashkenazi director and Shaul Trigano, his one-time, now estranged Sephardic screenwriter.
What begins as a very personal deconstruction of artistic choices made decades ago, becomes, in the end, a meditation between two styles of art, two ways of being Jewish, two ways, in fact, of being human. Gripping from the first page, The Retrospective takes place as much in the surreal world of imagination and artistry as the real world of a man facing the indignities of physical decline, the unrelenting persistence of desire, and the need to make peace with the ghosts of the past. - Shivaun
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