The Tunnel by A.B Yehoshua, Kirkus review

1 June 2020

Struggling with early-stage dementia, a recently retired engineer living in Tel Aviv volunteers his services for a military project in the Negev Desert that is threatened by unexpected human complications. Zvi Luria's mental condition first makes itself known through the 72-year-old man's inability to remember people's first names—a failing that results in hapless social encounters. With a boost from his loving, assertive wife, Dina, a respected pediatrician approaching retirement, Luria becomes an unpaid assistant to Maimoni, an admiring young engineer working in his old office. The future of a secret military road in the huge Ramon Crater is thrown into doubt with the discovery that a family of undocumented West Bank Palestinians is living in hiding on a hilltop there in an ancient Nabatean ruin. To protect the dwellers, Luria proposes carving a tunnel through the rock rather than demolishing it. When Dina becomes ill and is unable to keep tabs on her impulsively drifting husband, his grasp on reality weakens. Ultimately so does his opposition to "mixing personal matters and work." In Escher-like fashion, the book spins out multiple versions of reality, including Luria's, in which the light in the tunnel of his consciousness steadily recedes; his wife's and children's in attempting to understand what he is thinking and feeling; and the humiliating mock reality invented by the Palestinians in taking on Hebrew names to pass as Jews. For all its unsettling emotion and dark overtones, this is one of Yehoshua's most spryly amusing efforts. The only first name Luria manages to remember—and keeps repeating—is the Arabic name of a young Palestinian woman who tells him to address her by her adopted name. His adventures with cellphones are priceless. Ultimately, the most important struggle is the one prescribed by his neurologist: "The spirit versus the brain." Whether Luria knows it or not, his spirit is more than willing. A quirky, deeply affecting work by a master storyteller.