PRAISE FOR
The Last Interview
“In Eshkol Nevo’s extraordinary The Last Interview, a writer reflects on that which sustains and troubles the human heart, including the fragility of love, the friability of truth, the constancy of friendship, and the certainty of loss. Through engaging prose, poignant storytelling, and the sorrowful yet irresistible voice of Nevo’s unforgettable narrator, we are asked to consider the question: How should we be in the world? Always heartfelt and often heartbreaking, The Last Interview is ultimately a balm for those of us living in these troubled times.”
—Judith Claire Mitchell, author of A Reunion of Ghosts
“Like J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Eshkol Nevo tells us one writer’s views of the world as he answers a series of questions posed in an online interview. His unflinchingly honest responses—on work, marriage, children, friendship, envy, guilt, and even the soul of Israel itself—make for an affecting portrait of a modern Israeli man looking for the truths of his life. The narrator reaches deep within my heart as he asks the ultimate question: How can we love, knowing there will be loss?”
—Elayne Klasson, author of Love Is a Rebellious Bird
“The Last Interview is a compelling, layered portrayal of friendship, family, and identity. Formally inventive and propulsive, Nevo braids threads of the political and personal with nuance and sensitivity.”
—Amy Feltman, author of Willa & Hesper
“Eshkol Nevo’s The Last Interview is a generous, graceful book—at once wry and raw, mournful and hopeful, ironic and tender. This book is a moving story of loss, love, and friendship, a thoughtful meditation on the porous borders between reality and fiction, and a true joy to read.”
—Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Sadness Is a White Bird
ALSO BY ESHKOL NEVO
Homesick
Neuland
Three Floors Up
World Cup Wishes
Copyright © 2018 Eshkol Nevo
First published in Israel as Ha-Re’ayon Ha-Acharon by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, Tel Aviv, in 2018.
English translation copyright © 2020 Sondra Silverston
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text designer: Jennifer Daddio
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Nevo, Eshkol, author. | Silverston, Sondra, translator.
Title: The last interview / Eshkol Nevo; translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston.
Other titles: Re’ayon ha-aḥaron. English Description: New York : Other Press, [2020] | First published in Israel as Ha-Re’ayon Ha-Acharon by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, Tel Aviv, in 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020003973 (print) | LCCN 2020003974 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635429879 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635429886 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PJ5055.35.E92 R4313 2020 (print) | LCC PJ5055.35.E92 (ebook) | DDC 892.43/7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003973
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003974
Ebook ISBN 9781635429886
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Eshkol Nevo
Title Page
Copyright
The Last Interview: A Novel
Credits
About the Authors
Did you always know you would be a writer?
No. But at some point in my adolescence, I realized that my masturbation fantasies were much more detailed than those of my close friends. With them it was always as bare bones as a mug shot. With me there were obstacles, conflicts, rounded-out characters. If I wanted to be aroused by my fantasies, I had to believe them, so I constructed them in great detail. I remember a night we spent in sleeping bags in the basement of Hagai Carmeli’s house, four close friends, and each one talked about his fantasies. I was the last one to speak, and by the time I finished, everyone was fast asleep, except Ari. Before zipping up his sleeping bag for the night, he said in a drowsy voice: Bro, I think you’re going to be a writer. But you have to learn to cut it down a little. What motivates you to write?
A teacher of mine once told me to keep a journal during the Passover vacation. I took a notebook to Ras Burqa and every once in a while I would take it up into the hills and write about the world beneath the water and the one above it.
Then my parents decided to move from Jerusalem to Haifa. I wrote a few protest poems against the move, but as usual with protest poems, it didn’t help.
After that, in twelfth grade, we had an end-of-year show and Tali Leshem played the flute. I wanted to be around her as much as possible in the hope that she would notice me, but I had no talent—I didn’t sing or dance or play a musical instrument. So I volunteered to write the lyrics for the songs in the show.
In the army, I wrote Tali letters. I thought that if she received a letter from me every day, she wouldn’t leave me for someone who came home more often.
In South America, after the army, I wrote letters to Dikla. Sometimes I wrote her about things that happened on the trip and sometimes I made up things that didn’t happen. I noticed that I enjoyed writing the made-up things more.
Dikla and I split right before I joined my first writing workshop, after I’d graduated from university, and every word that came out of me there, maybe even ever since, was an attempt to fill the huge space created by her absence.
A year later, Dikla and I got back together.
Then I made a few choices in my life: marriage, kids, a mortgage.
Life moved onto a much too narrow path,
