Three Floors Up

By: Eshkol Nevo, Sondra Silverston - translator

Narrated by: Deepti Gupta, Neil Shah

Set in an upper-middle-class Tel Aviv apartment building, this best-selling and warmly acclaimed Israeli novel examines the interconnected lives of its residents, whose turmoils, secrets, unreliable confessions, and problematic decisions reveal a society in the midst of an identity crisis.

On the first floor, Arnon, a tormented retired officer who fought in the First Intifada, confesses to an army friend with a troubled military past how his obsession about his young daughter's safety led him to lose control and put his marriage in peril.

Above Arnon lives Hani, known as "the widow", whose husband travels the world for his lucrative job while she stays at home with their two children, increasingly isolated and unstable. When her brother-in-law suddenly appears at their door begging her to hide him from loan sharks and the police, she agrees in spite of the risk to her family, if only to bring some emotional excitement into her life.

On the top floor lives a former judge, Devora. Eager to start a new life in her retirement, Devora joins a social movement, desperately tries to reconnect with her estranged son, and falls in love with a man who isn't what he seems.

©2015 Eshkol Nevo; English translation copyright 2017 by Eshkol Nevo (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Emotionally powerful

I found this book to be a very touching and emotionally powerful. The prose touched my heart.

Excellent for Book Club Discussions

Narration - slow; I used 1.25x. I enjoyed the book more reading it hard copy. Much to think from many aspects about these 3 stories of families on the 3 floors of the same building.

Excellent

At first I didn’t feel that I would like the book. The first floor was uncomfortable. But as I stayed with the book, I liked it more and more. The third floor was philosophical and excellent. I highly recommend this book. It is hard to put down and gives the reader lots to mull over.

Read this book, don’t listen to it

Wise, thoughtful, well-written, well-translated story and remarkably captivating stories. But the choice of the narrator for the 2nd and 3rd story is so poor that I struggled to get past it. Indian ascent for Israeli characters just doesn’t work. And the speed of the narration is unlike any I had heard before. I had to adjust it to 1.5 for the 2nd story and 1.3 for the 3rd.

Decent writing - awful narration

There is not a single name of a person or place in the last two-thirds of this book that is not somehow mispronounced. One would think that a professional narrator would try to learn the correct pronunciation of the Hebrew text, as well as the English translation ("chasm" - the ch should sound like "kasm", just one example that made me cringe) It also strikes me as a bizarre choice to narrate a Hebrew novel with a heavy Indian accent as if anything not originally in English is somehow lumped under "ethnic". The narrator did not even have the decency to pronounce the author's name correctly in the end. Altogether a reasonably decent and readable novel was thoughtlessly slaughtered by this narration.

Not for me (but excellent translation)

I read this book because it was my book club’s selection for this month. I did not enjoy it and couldn’t wait for it to end. There are three parts/stories to the book and each part was better than the one before, but still. The first two parts in particular were very disturbing in content. I also didn’t enjoy the author’s style. He meandered all over the place ( again, the first two parts were worse than the third) It drove me nuts, as did the cryptic nature of the stories. I’ve read other books like that in which there’s a process about how things are revealed. They were fine. But this book was extremely irritating. I will add, though, that the translation was excellent and flawless. The reader is unable to detect that this is a translation. The narration was less than mediocre and, admittedly, may have influenced my overall opinion of the book. There were several glaring mispronunciations of words.