The Tunnel

By: A.B. Yehoshua, Stuart Schoffman - translator

Narrated by: Rick Zieff

From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father—an engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project.

Until recently, Zvi Luria was a healthy man in his 70s, an engineer living in Tel Aviv with his wife, Dina, visiting with their two children whenever possible. Now he is showing signs of early dementia, and his work on the tunnels of the Trans-Israel Highway is no longer possible. To keep his mind sharp, Zvi decides to take a job as the unpaid assistant to Asael Maimoni, a young engineer involved in a secret military project: a road to be built inside the massive Ramon Crater in the northern Negev Desert.

The challenge of the road, however, is compounded by strange circumstances. Living secretly on the proposed route, amid ancient Nabatean ruins, is a Palestinian family under the protection of an enigmatic archaeological preservationist. Zvi rises to the occasion, proposing a tunnel that would not dislodge the family. But when his wife falls sick, circumstances begin to spiral....

The Tunnel—wry, wistful, and a tour de force of vital social commentary—is Yehoshua at his finest.

©2020 A. B. Yehoshua and Stuart Schoffman (P)2020 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Way Too Convoluted

I kept listening, primarily just to hear more about Israel. The performance was very weak, making the protagonist seem much more like a child, peripherally mocking the horrors of the onset of dementia. On the whole characters are poorly developed. Zvi's children are distant, selfish and condescending at best, having picked that up from different aspects of their controlling mother. The most basic Hebrew words are mispronounced while more complicated ones are pronounced correctly. It looks like somebody was just lazy. How hard would it be to get an Israeli to read this?

And the supposed main idea of the book, the tunnel, just does not hold my interest as a main idea the way it's written. The characters surrounding it don't create buy-in for me. The issues surrounding them go in 100 different directions. They lack focus. And that ending was a shocker.

It all seems like a high school student's outline for a book he or she might want to write someday but never gets to put together properly and weed out the stuff that doesn't belong.