Between Life and Death

The final literary testament of “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World” (New York Times), Between Life and Death is a startlingly brave, funny, poetic, and moving autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life. In Between Life and Death, famed Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk describes the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. Told in an arresting, dreamlike style that blends playfulness with fearless honesty, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness and understand what led him to fight for his life with such tenacity. Shifting between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony, Kaniuk inquires into the place of death in society, the lust for life, and the force of human relationships. He also writes movingly about the Holocaust survivors of his childhood neighborhood, and the battles of the 1948 War of Independence, in which he fought. Full of renewed vitality at the age of seventy-four, Kaniuk announced his rebirth in Between Life and Death, and left us a treasure of world literature that is sure to become a classic. He won the Bialik Prize, the French Prix de Droits de l'Homme, the Israeli President's Prize, the Newman Prize, and the Sapir Prize for Literature. Barbara Harshav has been translating works from French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish for over twenty years and has currently published over forty books of translation including works of poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, economics, sociology, and history. PRAISE “A stunning tale. Nothing suits Kaniuk's writing like this semi-consciousness that is conducive to a free association of images and sensations… Of this dark tale, Kaniuk has said that with the exception of the Book of Job, it is the funniest text ever written about death… In Between Life and Death, laughter is present everywhere: in his self-mockery, in his ironic sketches of his fellow men, in the surreal situations he describes, and the sometimes outrageous shortcuts he permits himself.” —Le Monde des livres “Kaniuk's Between Life and Death is a unique piece of travel literature, a powerfully eloquent text which takes the reader into a land, which is at once a no-man's-land and yet unmistakably Kaniuk-land… Kaniuk has proved once again that he is not only the most outlandish and the most radical among Israel's authors, but also the youngest and the most courageous.” —Kulturzeit (Zeit) “Kaniuk’s best novel to date… The author captures a rare voice, a tone which is elegiac, full of rhythm, paratactic, and irresistible in its pull… It achieves excellence and transparent wonder.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “Kaniuk's characteristic, unmistakable style of narrating and his passionate, fascinating language make this memoir a gripping reading experience” —Die Welt “It's amazing to realize that even in one’s terminal moments, a person can still possess the most extraordinary power of thought and imagination, which carries him on mysterious wings to the distant and most hidden realms of his life… The soul of this productive, flowing, stormy Tel Aviv writer, who may b