InkBlog

Not much is fair in love during war, from Odysseus’s test of Penelope’s faithfulness to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s doomed Winston and Julia

There are endless ways to start a novel. One ill-advised way would be to start with the protagonist making coffee … pouring milk … adding sugar. Stirring spoon.

Even worse advised would be to wait … until the water boils.

Long. Boring. Seconds. The writer would probably lose most readers before the water reached 100 degrees.

Unless … It is the middle of a war and our protagonist is making coffee.

Bombers are rushing through the sky. We can hear them through the window. The sound of the roaring bombs falling on the city mixes with the sound of the water boiling in the kettle. Even a dull action like making coffee is charged with different meaning, when the real possibility of death stands in the room. And if that’s what happens to a simple cup of coffee when it’s wartime, just imagine what happens to love.

My novel One Night, Markovitch starts on the eve of the second world war, when two men are sent to Europe to enter fraudulent marriages with Jewish women and get them out before it’s too late. Novels that combine love and war set up two eternal rivals on the battlefield: Eros and Thanatos. Man’s capacity for love, compassion and creation clash with humankind’s ability to destroy, crash and kill. It is from the bloody wrestle between Eros and Thanatos – or from the sweaty coitus of these two – that literature is born.

1. The Odyssey by Homer

Let’s start with the classics, the ones that we all know but never bother to read. To be honest, it is only after the very recent new translation into Hebrew that I began to grasp the beauty of this intimidating masterpiece. It tells the story of the journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his wife Penelope, after the end of Trojan war. A man returns home from many battles, only to discover that home is not the home he left, and the wife is not the wife he left, and the man himself is not the same one that left. Usually when we talk about the price of war, we talk about the dead. But here we see the price paid by the living: a woman can’t recognise her own husband. A son can’t recognise his own father.

2. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

American Robert Jordan joins anti-fascist guerrillas during the Spanish civil war. It is only in the middle of a war that he rediscovers his passion for life, through his relationship with Maria, a young Spanish woman. This is a classic war novel, based on Hemingway’s own experience as a reporter during the war. You can find here the warning signs of Hemingway’s own inner carnage, the psychological war that ended with his suicide. But you can also find here too a lust for life, with all its pain and beauty.

3. Beloved by Toni Morrison

Some historians tell us that the American civil war ended in 1865. But just because they say the war was over then (it wasn’t even officially so until the following August), it doesn’t mean that it was over in the minds of the people who suffered it. Beloved, by the Pulitzer and Nobel-winning fixture of the modern books pantheon, is set in the years after President Andrew Johnson signed the Proclamation – Declaring that Peace, Order, Tranquillity, and Civil Authority Now Exists in and Throughout the Whole of the United States of America in 1866. Sethe, an escaped slave, tries to build a life as a free woman. As the possibility of love emerges, the past comes back to haunt her. Morrison suggests that for some people the war is never done, and examines whether, in such cases, love even has a chance.

4. To the End of the Land by David Grossman

An Israeli mother drives her son to the army basecamp, and returns to an empty house. Haunted by visions of army officers knocking on her door with the most terrible news, she runs off “to the end of the land”. This surreal journey is accompanied by a former soldier: an old friend – or lover – suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. One of the best novels ever written in Hebrew.

5. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

When Grossman started To the End of the Land, he had no way of knowing that he would lose one of his sons in a war before he finished writing it. When Némirovsky started writing Suite Française in 1940, she didn’t know that she wouldn’t live to see a printed copy. Némirovsky was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, and the manuscript was found 60 years later. While Hemingway writes about the war through the eyes of the fighters at the front, Némirovsky focuses on those left behind. Her portrait of a French village during the Nazi occupation includes the love story of a Nazi officer and a French woman whose husband is a prisoner of war.

6. The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

Like Beloved, this novel also takes place after the end of a war, in this case the first world war. The extreme poverty – a direct impact of the war – shapes the characters’ lives. The novel starts as a vivid, humorous Cinderella story, only to become a tragedy of classes. Two young lovers – a discharged soldier and a post-office girl – wander the streets of Vienna, longing to make love, but can’t afford a decent room.

7 . Neuland by Eshkol Nevo

Dori and Inbar have to travel to the other side of the world – Argentina – to understand their connection to Israel and its everlasting wars. Only from a safe distance can they see their national identity and look at their intimate relationships. Just as people carry out postmortems of failed relationships, this novel is a postmortem of the romantic fantasy of “just Israel”. As many wonder “Can we still work it out?” about romantic relationships in crisis, Nevo wonders the same about the Israeli state. This could easily be a didactic metaphor but, luckily for us, Nevo is a master of plot.

8. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being takes place, partly, during the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact nations in 1968. Historically, the invasion was not considered “a war”. But for the novel’s protagonists, it was a declaration of war on the freedom to think, to act, to love. Kundera interweaves his characters’ love lives with their reaction to the brutal invasion, and presents a philosophical yet erotic tapestry.

9 . Les Cerfs-volants by Romain Gary

A French village boy falls in love with an aristocratic Polish girl on the eve of the second world war. The protagonist joins the French Resistance, but the biggest resistance to tyranny lies in his loyalty to his lost love. Lovers should be able to wait, and to hope, and – most of all – to remember. And so, the boy waits for the return of his lover, just as he waits for the return of his beloved France, even while the Nazi flag is hanging from the windows.

10. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

While all the other novels in this list take place during an actual war, Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays a dystopian, perpetual war, with no signs of ending. War is eternal, impersonal and ahistoric. Love, on the other hand, is personal, temporal and the ultimate form of resistance. While war serves the interests of the government through fear, love is an anti-fascist act. As an Israeli writer, I find Nineteen Eighty-Four the most disturbing of the novels listed above, as it reminds me of the dangerous state of Israeli democracy these days.

• One Night, Markovitch by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is published by Pushkin Press. Buy it from the Guardian Bookshop.
  

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaG5nmqq5cH6YaK6aqqSeuqZ5y6itnmWjqbyztcSsZKWhpJq%2FosDUq5xmmamauabAjKCsp5yRp3qou9KhnKc%3D