Over the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, an Israeli couple spends a week apart: the husband at home, tending to his elevator business, his children, and his grandchildren, and the wife in Tanzania, visiting her widower brother-in-law in order to properly mourn for her beloved sister. The wife, sitting in an airport terminal, blankly turns the pages of a novel that promises that an "elusive secret only implied at the outset will by the end turn everything upside down."
At first, A. B. Yehoshua's scrupulous interest in the mundane details of a single week in the lives of Amotz and Daniela Ya'ari indicates that this is precisely not that kind of novel. And yet, as we delve ever deeper into the hidden intricacies of "Friendly Fire," whose title alone indicates a multiplicity of meanings, it becomes clear that what had at first seemed a return to the Faulknerian cacophony of competing voices heard in his earlier novel "A Late Divorce" is in fact a sequel to Yehoshua's 2006 novel "A Woman in Jerusalem." Here, too, as in that novel about a mysterious woman killed in a suicide bombing, death is an equation with no possibility of solution.
