By Eshkol Nevo (Trans: Sondra Silverston)
Chatto & Windus
Eshkol Nevo's first, impressive novel, Homesick (2008), was on the Israeli bestseller list for 60 weeks and won two major prizes. His second, World Cup Wishes, is better still. Starting as an entertaining read about male friendship, it gets darker and more interesting, until it reaches a powerful and moving climax.
It is the story of four friends in their late 20s.They grew up in Haifa but have moved to Tel Aviv. From 1986, they always watch the World Cup together. Then, in 1998, one of the friends suggests they each write "where he dreams of being in another four years. And at the next World Cup, we'll open the papers and see what happened in the meantime."
This sounds a bit too vague for Churchill, the lawyer. "Let's be organised," he says. "Everyone writes three things. Three short sentences. Otherwise there'll be no end to it." World Cup Wishes is an account of the friends' wishes and what becomes of them by the time of the 2002 World Cup, as told by one of the friends, Yuval. Except that, from the book's opening, we already know that something has happened to Yuval. Something terrible.
The novel starts out as a kind of Israeli version of Friends. Four young, quirky men fall in love, fall out of love, marry, have children, put up with each other's eccentricities. Churchill, the lawyer, is the bossy, ambitious one. Amichai is already married (to Ilana the Weeper), with twins. Ofir is in advertising but changes his life, and Yuval, the book's narrator, can't decide what to do with his philosophy PhD and meanwhile works as a freelance translator. They are an engaging group and all undergo changes in their lives.
Change is in fact the novel's driving force. How the friends change - and how Israel changes around them. One of the great strengths of Nevo's earlier novel, Homesick, was how delicately he dealt with politics. One of the questions that is always in the background, in both books, is "what's happening to all that pain we don't let in?" Yuval is tormented by memories of an incident he witnessed during his military service. Some of the characters are preoccupied with what is happening to the Palestinians and there is a sharp sense of the growing brutalisation of Israeli society.
Increasingly, the question becomes more pressing: is there a future for such decent, well-meaning men in Israel?
But this is much more than a political novel. As it moves forward, it develops into a cleverer, more literary book. It becomes increasingly clear that we cannot entirely trust Yuval --- certainly according to the other narrator, his friend Churchill. The story which seemed straightforward, is anything but. What started as a realistic novel about everyday life in Israel evolves into a story about storytelling. In doing so, it confirms Nevo as one of the best young Israeli writers today.
