A.B. Yehoshua has been called "Israel's Faulkner," but his beautiful writing leads me to think of him as "Israel's Vargas Llosa." This story could certainly have been written by the Peruvian Nobelist. It is built as if by a master cabinetmaker and includes the feature that no one is named (except by occupation or relation) other than the woman at the heart of the story, a foreigner living in Jerusalem who was killed in a terrorist attack and whose body lay unclaimed until a weekly scandal sheet takes to task her employer for ignoring her. The journey into eastern Europe by the personnel manager of the company to return the body to its home soil becomes, first, an adventure, and then something deeper.
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