This summer I re-read Sayed Kashua’s Second Person (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015). It is a novel that I read a few years ago upon the recommendation of my bookstore, of which I have been a customer for over forty years and to which I generally show great interest, and I have partially re-read it on other occasions. The subject matter it raises has always struck me as very literary and profound, because it can be a sublimation of what many people want for their lives: to be someone else.
It was written in 2010 by an author who knows Israeli society very well, who really knows what the so-called coexistence between Israelis and Israeli Arabs is like, and how these two cultures remain alien to each other, revising the prejudices that have always existed. No matter how modern some want to look. A clear example of this would be the following opinion about the Betzabel school: “Everyone would kill to have an Arab student in their department, in which world do you live?” (p.167). Therefore, this novel captures the identity and agency between Jews and Israeli Arabs that led to cultural integration through the assimilation of Israeli Arabs into Israeli culture: “The lawyer parked his large vehicle in the parking lot of the Jewish school. He had made Arabs like him, even friends” (p.16) ; as well as thinking that the backwardness of Arab society is due to the role of Arab women (p.131) or the need for everyone to have a good physical image (p.140) Although what is verifiable is that people do not pay attention to something important such as their own name also: “Distortion of Arabic names was common in Israeli institutions” (p.202).
The novel begins with a first chapter through a third-person narrator who introduces and characterizes the lawyer from afar without naming him: The lawyer is an Israeli Arab who is successful in social, professional and personal spheres. However, with the desire to improve himself, he reads everything that his bookseller and his wife recommend. And here a narrative anecdote is offered, because in a second-hand copy of the Kreutzer Sonata you will find a note from his wife Laila. From that moment on, everything turns upside down when he suspects his wife of infidelity. Because of his view of the world and his cultural machismo, jealousy, which is the main theme of the novel, consumes him to the point of asking Google: “Why do women cheat?” (p.130). He just wants revenge and is trying to contact the book’s original owner.
And here the story becomes unique, because in the second part it switches to first person, where a perfectly crafted character will tell us his own story; through a slow narrative that will become very complex with this play and transfer of identity. As a human being, it’s a psychological perspective that shows the other side of the coin. Interspersing the two stories and their narrators in alternating chapters, the plot moves towards its conclusion in an epilogue, a wonderful climax that demonstrates the exquisite mastery of thematic progression in the novel.
It’s a great story that shows the main characters’ need to find and know themselves in the society they live in, in what seems more important than the I, the you, and its imitation of one’s own self. Hence the possible interpretation of the novel’s title in the second person, in relation to the difficult coexistence of two groups of people in Israel: “And any official knew that no one in the country wanted to be Arab” (p. 239). .
So why should you read this novel? Because it has the features that make the novel very attractive: a very well-connected narrative structure that captures the reader from the very beginning, a very good command of the dosage of narrative data and high readability; an exotic component, because it shows us a society that lives far away from our own; this can, paradoxically, help us understand our own society and its individuals, since many people may want to live in “that second person of the singular”; and of course, because the reading pleasure that we always look for when we open a novel is guaranteed here.